Linux/Ubuntu upgrades - should I do them?

Our system has been running happily on an Amazon EC2 instance running Ubuntu 14.04.05 LTS

When I login I get:

63 packages can be updated.
35 updates are security updates.

New release '16.04.2 LTS' available.
Run 'do-release-upgrade' to upgrade to it.

Q1: should I ignore the available updates or install them

Q2: should I upgrade to 16.04.2 LTS

That is, should I go the 'if its happily running, leave it alone' approach, or the 'always keep it updated' approach?

I would appreciate input from those with more *nix experience than myself.

Regards, Tim G

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Re: Linux/Ubuntu upgrades - should I do them?

Tim...

I'm running 14.04.05 on our production servers, backups, etc. 

Q1. I've been keeping the Ubuntu updates current and have not encountered any issues with OpenVPMS at all using apt-get upgrade and apt-get dist-upgrade.  I did have a boot issue on one of my VirtualBox clones, but traced it to a full boot partition.  So I religiously run apt-get autoremove as well on everything at the same time as doing the upgrades.

Q2. Do not execute the do-release-upgrade however, as one of the things it does is upgrade MySQL to 5.7 and OpenVPMS chokes on it.  Tim A. suggested a workaround but it is not the way he plans to officially support 5.7 in the future as I understand.

I did implement the Ubuntu Hardware Enablement Stack however, and that seems to work fine as well. It installs the Xenial 4.4 series kernel.

This does bring up a question I've had for awhile, however.  We are now 3+ years into Ubuntu LTS and have not been able to upgrade to 16.04 (without a bunch of blacklisting) because of MySQL.  I'm wondering  what the roadmap is for distro/version support.  I've looked in Debian 8 as it may more closely develop at the same pace as OVPMS but am reluctant to make a big change if most OVPMS Linux users are on Ubuntu. 

Sam

 

Re: Linux/Ubuntu upgrades - should I do them?

Sam - apologies for the late reply.  Thanks for the advice - I have done the test and standby systems and production will be done by the time you read this.

I had a shock when I did the standby system (which sits there with Tomcat off and mysql running in slave mode). I had assumed that since tomcat was not running it would not be started - however it did - something I did not want because I knew that starting tomcat (even though I would not login) would cause database updates.

However, these failed because I have mysql in read-only mode (as well as slave).

Regards, Tim G

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