Part of what makes sysadminafterdark unique is my stance to run every facet of the business as publicly as possible. This includes releasing software patch notes and informing users when my services will be unavailable via our UptimeKuma portal.
As we all know, software patches are an essential part of information technology and ensures servers and applications continue to run smoothly by resolving bugs, adding new features, and patching security issues.
Particularly, I am staunchly against high uptime and prefer to perform maintenance every month or whenever news breaks of a high level security issue. I suppose it’s cool to see a server online for two years, but to me it just screams “I suck at IT hygiene”. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Software patches were applied to all twenty-one of my servers after the patch window was announced on sysadminafterdark’s twitter page. The maintenance window lasted three hours and completed successfully without any production breaking issues. Here’s a brief change log of the work completed.
Software Patch Change Notes
- Performed Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS updates. This required VM level OS reboots.
- Upgraded Docker containers to latest versions: UptimeKuma, LinkStack, and Discourse.
- GitLab was upgraded to the latest version as part of SAD-GIT01’s OS level patches.
- Mattermost upgraded to version 9.0.
- Upgraded vCenter from 8.0 to 8.0.2 – the latest version.
- Legal, cookie notices and Woo added back to website.
Conclusion
The next round of software patches will kick off in November. This is currently being done by hand, however, I am devoting resources to automating this on the back end. I am not sure if the automation deployment will production ready by this time. I am also planning a 10GB deploy for both VMware hosts and considering a high availability virtual PFsense deployment. This would enable me to route at 10GB and migrate the proxy server to the edge with HAProxy. There will be more on this in the coming weeks.
Update - October 7th: Sara and I are discussing the 10GB upgrade. Parts should be ordered around OCT. 16.