Deciding when to upgrade svn.gnome.org

The server behind svn.gnome.org still runs the previous Ubuntu LTS (Dapper / 6.06). I want to upgrade this to the latest Ubuntu LTS, this being Hardy / 8.04. The upgrade itself should not take more than 30min, but the downtime will be longer than that (rsync’ing everything to another machine). I’ll setup another machine to handle SVN in case the distro upgrade the distro upgrade fails in unexpected ways.

I’m currently thinking of Sat 7 or Sun 8 Jun 2008. I prefer Sunday mornings (CEST / UTC +2) as hopefully not too many people are online. Further, the most important users of svn.gnome.org are developers and I expect less usage in the weekend. The weekend is more popular for translators though. It also isn’t just before an important release.

Above date is not fixed, I still have to check if there is someone standing by with physical access.

Anyone think above is a bad idea? Better suggestions regarding when to schedule this? Note: During the week it has to be in the evening (UTC +2).

Note: After the upgrade, the repository format has to be changed, but I’ll do that later. It shouldn’t be more than a few minutes per repository (due to converting it twice, first the whole repository, then disallowing commits, then doing the commits that have been made when the conversion was running). The repository format should allow things like svnsync, plus repository size should be smaller. See http://subversion.tigris.org/svn_1.4_releasenotes.html.

4 Replies to “Deciding when to upgrade svn.gnome.org”

  1. Glad to see the upgrade to 1.4. Wish it could be 1.5, but oh well, should be released for next time!

    I’m fine with your schedule, btw.

  2. Do be aware that there is a bug in Hardy that can cause the system to hang periodically (#223081 for instance); this has hit me on my laptop, but also one of our clusters. You may want to make sure you still have the previous kernel installed and can boot up with that in case you get the same issue.

  3. janne: Thanks, I didn’t see any problems with our other server, but might depend on the load. I’ll check to ensure we won’t get hit by that (or perhaps delay the upgrade).

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