[olug] Best Practices Recommendation

[Rob Townley]

Things to consider:

- some of the firmware updates for our dell server had to do with
fixing a situation along the lines of something as serious as the raid
array could not be rebuilt without an update.

- Many of these servers have built in remote access to the bios that
have had security patches released.

On Apr 2, 2005 10:40 AM, Andrew Embury <drazak at ingenii.com> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> My group maintains about 50 and growing x86 servers (Tier 1 - Dell and HP)
> running Windows and Linux (mostly Windows) throughout the city.  We have a
> number of servers internally, but most of them belong to external clients.
> My question is, do those of you in similar circumstances proactively
> update items such as BIOS Firmware, RAID controller firmware, and driver
> updates (NIC, RAID, etc)?
> 
> I've generally done these updates proactively internally, but am torn if
> its worth it to apply such updates for external clients, most of whom
> their servers and associated systems are running just fine and run
> the risk of creating a problem or downtime that did not exist before.
> 
> Just to be clear, were not talking software and security updates...we
> already quickly apply these.
> 
> I do have deployment tools to ease this should we decide to go ahead with
> this.  I'm leaning towards no, and only applying these kind of updates if
> they address a specific problem, but wanted to get other opinions and
> experiences.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Andrew
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