Are you mirroring the Zimbra repo's internally Mark? Then you can clearly see which packages are updated.
No, and my argument to Zimbra is that the Patch Release Notes should be written with a view that the commercial customer reader is an overworked sysadmin responsible for 10-20 different application stacks, of which Zimbra is only one.
Right now, zmcontrol -v says 10.0.8 on our LDAP servers, 10.0.9 on our Proxy/MTA servers, and 10.0.10 on our mailbox servers. Oh, and the Admin Console say 10.0.9, which seems odd to me, since it's a mailstore that serves up the Console web site.
Meanwhile, we have an extensive process to back up customizations on the Proxy/MTA servers, to be able to restore them after a patch. I spent a lot of extra time executing those processes on our Proxy/MTA servers, and watched my blood pressure rise as Ubuntu said there were no updates for our LDAP nor Proxy/MTA servers (which as many here know, should be updated in that order and ahead of the mailstores.)
It would have been a kindness and really easy for whomever writes the Patch Release Notes simply to say like "Dear Customers: this patch need be installed only on mailstores, and it's intended that in a multi-server environment servers without the mailstore role will report an earlier patch version." Especially so for an important security patch, which should be applied ASAP.
I opened a Support Case for this, and Support reported that Development felt that I should, each time a patch is released, just cross-reference the separate installation doc to figure out which package(s) get installed on which nodes, and then line that up with the list of updated packages in the patch release notes to determine if I can skip applying updates to any category of servers. I was as you might expect not supportive of that position and tried to constructively make the point that while such a position was totally technically correct, it was not as customer-friendly as it could have been.
Hope that helps,
Mark
Statistics: Posted by L. Mark Stone — Wed Oct 16, 2024 2:34 pm