My home PC, about once a week, or whenever I have to install new software. My work PC, about once a month because the nvidia driver takes fucking ages to update because of DKMS.
As for the servers under my professional care… it depends. Most of the servers that I made run Debian that I update three times a year whenever the downtime is acceptable for the university (spring break, late summer, early december) or if a CVE needs fixing (e.g. xz-utils). One internet-facing server that I inherited still runs Ubuntu 16.04 because some teachers can’t possibly live without some legacy software and will throw a tantrum if upgrading is even mentioned – that one gets zero updates, and I got the dean’s promise in writing that I wouldn’t be held responsible for it.
The big virtualization server still runs ESXi 6 because the university didn’t want to pay for a lifetime license when it was available, doesn’t want to pay for a subscription now, and doesn’t want the downtime required to fully migrate to Proxmox VE. So it gets no updates. Plus it has a bad SSL cert and I need Chromium’s thisisunsafe to bypass the error.
I inherited a lot of Ubuntu servers at the university, too. But I am not directly responsible which makes life easier; I am just managing it.
Interestingly, they agreed to monthly updates with possible restarts and they are fine with it, because I keep the servers healthy. And: We even plan to move from VMWare hypervisor to Proxmox VE as well, but we can do it in stages without big downtimes.
There is one CentOS server carefully isolated which cannot be updated anymore. Moving it to Rocky would introduce a big downtime and redoing a lot of custom config. Luckily the user-facing server of that cluster is running a current Rocky Linux.
The things, I established so far, are running stable Debian. Nice to see Proxmox VE being based on Debian. (:
It is interesting that you are in a similar boat, but with a different outcome. I hope that your colleguas will reconsider some day.
My home PC, about once a week, or whenever I have to install new software. My work PC, about once a month because the nvidia driver takes fucking ages to update because of DKMS.
As for the servers under my professional care… it depends. Most of the servers that I made run Debian that I update three times a year whenever the downtime is acceptable for the university (spring break, late summer, early december) or if a CVE needs fixing (e.g. xz-utils). One internet-facing server that I inherited still runs Ubuntu 16.04 because some teachers can’t possibly live without some legacy software and will throw a tantrum if upgrading is even mentioned – that one gets zero updates, and I got the dean’s promise in writing that I wouldn’t be held responsible for it.
The big virtualization server still runs ESXi 6 because the university didn’t want to pay for a lifetime license when it was available, doesn’t want to pay for a subscription now, and doesn’t want the downtime required to fully migrate to Proxmox VE. So it gets no updates. Plus it has a bad SSL cert and I need Chromium’s
thisisunsafeto bypass the error.It’s fucking rough out here.
I inherited a lot of Ubuntu servers at the university, too. But I am not directly responsible which makes life easier; I am just managing it.
Interestingly, they agreed to monthly updates with possible restarts and they are fine with it, because I keep the servers healthy. And: We even plan to move from VMWare hypervisor to Proxmox VE as well, but we can do it in stages without big downtimes.
There is one CentOS server carefully isolated which cannot be updated anymore. Moving it to Rocky would introduce a big downtime and redoing a lot of custom config. Luckily the user-facing server of that cluster is running a current Rocky Linux.
The things, I established so far, are running stable Debian. Nice to see Proxmox VE being based on Debian. (:
It is interesting that you are in a similar boat, but with a different outcome. I hope that your colleguas will reconsider some day.