Updates in Webmin

[ronjohntaylor]

Robbie
I have a few questions relating to updates in NEMS 1.3.1 WEBMIN.

Currently WEBMIN show that I have 15 updates that are available for different packages in stretch.
I have attached a screenshot showing them below.

My questions is

1. Should I apply these updates through WEBMIN?
2. Does the rolling updates take care of this?

I would think that in the interests of consistency, the 2nd option would be more desirable but I don't know which is planned and hence the question.

I would seek you council on this as a long term maintenance issue on NEMS.

PS I don't intend to do anything myself until I get the new RPi 3 B+ and see how this effects the stability issue I am having as this would only introduce another variable(s) and there are too many now.

 

Cheers

[Robbie Ferguson]

Hi Ron,
Those updates are optional, and could break things. I would only generally run them if 1) you have a current backup and don't mind re-flashing if needed or 2) you are experienced in fixing Linux issues after a package upgrade breaks something.

NEMS is setup to automatically provision all security-related upgrades, but the optional stuff is rolled into upgrades (not updates).

To be clear, I'm talking nems-update vs. nems-upgrade. nems-update keeps your system up to date (don't worry, you don't have to do this - it happens automatically). nems-upgrade on the other hand is a full upgrade of not only NEMS (eg., the upgrade from 1.3 to 1.3.1) but also all the optional underlying OS stuff. Because the upgrade process is more dangerous (upgrading can break things) it is very clear that you should have a backup, and also the nems-upgrade process is only ever run manually by you. I never push out upgrades forcibly. That is up to the user to decide if they want the upgraded packages and latest NEMS.

So, in Webmin, you'll see Linux packages that apt reports as being upgradeable. They are not critical (usually) and could break things, so depending on your level of experience, you can either wait for your next nems-upgrade, or create a backup and run your upgrades yourself instead.

nems-upgrade is backed by me. Upgrading via webmin or apt is a Linux thing and I can't really account for that level of support.

[ronjohntaylor]

Thanks Robbie,
Good explanation.  
Pretty much what I thought. I just wanted to be sure.


 I will ignore WEBMIN now and let NEMS do it's thing.

Upgrades, yes another kettle of fish for sure.

I was trained to always have what we called a "fallback" strategy.


For NEMS I have a backup system on an External HDD of 

1. Backup Images before and after updates or at least once every month or so
2. backup.nems Files that are downloaded every week.  These are pretty stagnant though since I have got the network configured with NConf but do them anyway.

Hoping next week to get rid of my stability issue with new RPi.  
In the worst case scenario, it continues :-( , I intend to put in a cron to reboot every 24 hours.  That I think will be a work around  while I am off site for a week.  I will remove when I return.

Cheers
Ron