[BlueOnyx:10087] Re: Conf files replaced by update

[Stephanie Sullivan]

Michael,

Thank you for a helpful and gracious reply to my rant.

When I made these comments I was thinking moving forward. No intent to drub
any of the contributors you Blue Onyx and especially you.

The appliance concept is a good one. I like that most of what I do is
through the GUI and it's easy to train a relatively inexperienced person to
do most of what needs to be done. The big "but" that follows is there is
quite a bit of stuff that needs to be done outside the GUI - this is NOT a
complaint, it is an observation of the reality of trying to operate a BX
based hosting platform. 

It's hard to know in a BX update what things are going to get overwritten
and have to be rebuilt or recovered from a backup, etc. Worse, when
something is broken and you discover it with an angry call from a client.
These are much more rare than the BQ days. They also happened with some
package upgrades. I had many calls with Brian a Nuonce back in the day about
how installing a new version of his php package overwrote the customized
php.ini with a default one that broke CMS's and php sites that depended upon
custom settings.

To expect everything that may be broken can be anticipated in a yum update
or package isn't reasonable. What would be is to build (over time as it's
learned) a FAQ of the various "gotcha's" on a per RPM or package basis. For
example, if you upgrade the php package save a copy of your
/etc/php53/php.ini as it will get overwritten. Or, the base-blueonyx.mod rpm
causes senmail.mc to be overwritten, but a backup in saved in the /etc/mail
directory to recover your customizations.

In the last mega update the community was amazing in finding issues and
sharing solutions to the issues that popped up.

Thank you again Michael for all you do and also for your kindness to a
ranting person who had her "button pushed".

	Thanks,
		-Stephanie


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Stauber [mailto:mstauber at blueonyx.it]
> Sent: Sunday, April 08, 2012 11:46 AM
> To: BlueOnyx General Mailing List
> Subject: [BlueOnyx:10084] Re: Conf files replaced by update
> 
> Hi Stephanie,
> 
> > I get Greg/Michael's point. What is frustrating to me about the
> conf file
> > overwriting I often see a conf file written appended with .rpmnew
> if an
> > existing conf file is being respected or the old one being moved to
> > .rpmold if a conf file is replacing the older.
> 
> Yes, the RPM mechanisms take care of these things nicely. That is
> true. But
> some of our config file changes (like the ones dealing with Sendmail)
> are done
> through constructors or handlers, some through RPM %triggers. So it
> is done
> outside of the usual RPM mechanisms.
> 
> After all, it has to be done out of RPM mechanisms, as a file owned
> by one RPM
> may not be modified or replaced by another RPM, which applies for
> sendmail.cf
> and sendmail.mc. They're owned by the "sendmail" RPM, so the BlueOnyx
> RPMs can
> only touch them by going a little round about such as %post install
> scripts,
> %triggers or relying on constructors to do the job when CCEd is
> restarted.
> 
> Could we modify the constructors or scripts to keep backups of
> configs they
> replace? Sure. However: Changes to sendmail.mc / sendmail.cf usually
> only
> happen when base-blueonyx.mod is updated, so I thought we were safe
> on this
> one. Because it wasn't updated. But I overlooked that base-
> maillist.mod and
> base-mailman.mod also run the initSendmail.sh script that triggers
> the
> changes.
> 
> This update was already massive enough that I had to keep notes of
> what could
> break if it wasn't done right. It turned out to be a long list and
> playing
> nice with sensibilities about Sendmail wasn't on it. Our scripts are
> smart
> enough to push changes to replaced sendmail.mc and sendmail.cf that
> were done
> through the GUI. But finding a way that retains any other manually
> done
> changes is way too much effort.
> 
> > The latter case is particularly important to me since just
> overwriting conf
> > files without saving a backup of the one being overwritten is way
> beyond
> > rude.
> 
> That could be. But we still follow the appliance idea where certain
> things
> should either be "hands off", or have the sticker "modify at your own
> risk"
> attached to it.
> 
> OK, I can (and will) modify base-blueonyx.mod's initSendmail.sh
> script to keep
> a backup copy of sendmail.cf and sendmail.mc when it replaces them.
> Not right
> now, but sometime down the road. But with that we're back in square
> one: When
> that RPM gets installed, your current sendmail config will be
> replaced once
> again. Which isn't really perfect either <sigh>.
> 
> --
> With best regards
> 
> Michael Stauber
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