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Never Update Anything

blog.kronis.dev

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61–70 of 121 posts

Re: Never Update Anything

#61

Post by chrisjj »

kccqzy wrote: post #34
knallfrosch wrote: post #31

We're being paid to migrate our hardware boxes programmatically to Windows 10 IoT LTSC so that new boxes ship with 10+ years of security. We're still supporting some XP devices (not connected to the internet.) So to anyone depending on us: You're welcome. But let me tell you something: Long-Term Support software mostly doesn't pay well, and it's not fun either. Meanwhile some Google clown is being paid 200k to fuck u…

The fucking up of Fitbit and the rewriting of Wallet are not the engineers' fault. These kind of projects are mostly decided and planned by PMs: clueless and incompetent PMs. For payments in particular it was not even just an incompetent PM, but an incompetent director that saw the success of the NBU Paisa payment in India and thought the U.S. would be the same. The engineers are at most just complicit. Those who are…

You're saying complicity is not a fault?? :)

Re: Never Update Anything

#62

Post by louwrentius »

KronisLV wrote: post #10

Oh hey, I was wondering why the VPS suddenly had over 100 load average, restarted Docker since the containers were struggling, now I know why (should be back now for a bit). Won't necessarily fix it, might need to migrate over to something else for the blog, with a proper cache, alongside actually writing better articles in the future. I don't think the article itself holds up that well, it's just that updates are of…

For contrast, I recently had a no 1. HN hit and my Pi4 never had a core beyond 20%

Yes, it’s a static website. It’s amazing how little performance you actually need to survive a HN avalanche

Re: Never Update Anything

#63

Post by albertP »

He. I've been running always everything one or two versions behind latest (for my personal laptop, not servers). That means mainly OS (e.g., macOS), but as long as I can avoid automatic updates, I do so.

I believe the chances of having a bricked laptop because of a bad update are higher than the chances of getting malware because running one or two versions behind the latest one.

Re: Never Update Anything

#64

Post by graemep »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #23
KronisLV wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alpine is pretty nice! I did end up opting for Ubuntu LTS (and maybe the odd Debian based image here or there) for most of my containers because it essentially has no surprises and is what I run locally, so I can reuse a few snippets to install certain tools and it also has a pretty long EOL, at the expense of larger images. Oddly enough, I also ended up settling on Apache over Nginx and even something like Caddy (bo…

Apache is stable for wrapping mixed services, but needs a few firewall rules to keep it functional (slow loris + mod_qos etc.) =) Ubuntu LTS kernels are actually pretty stable, but containers are still recommended. ;)

What exactly do you do to protect Apache from slow loris? Its my main reason for not using Apache.

Re: Never Update Anything

#65

Post by numpad0 »

tivert wrote: post #26
EvanAnderson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frequent updates, in the old days, meant that a vendor had poor QA. I think that's probably still the case most of the time today, too.

> Frequent updates, in the old days, meant that a vendor had poor QA. I think that's probably still the case most of the time today, too. The internet has normalized poor QA. The bosses don't give a shit about QA anymore because it's so cheap to just push out a patch. I mean just look at old video game magazines that talked about the software development process: the developers would test the hell out of a game, then…

Windows XP. High profile zero day cases and Windows Update during 2000s created a "security updates are like dietary supplements" mindset.

Re: Never Update Anything

#66

Post by Plasmoid »

I was working at a place that delivered onprem software. One customer asked us "We like features of version N but we're running N-1. Can you backport them so you don't have to upgrade?". I replied we'd already done that, it was called version N.

Re: Never Update Anything

#67

Post by mike741 »

Urgent updates can be necessary every once in a while but should be recognized as technical failures on the part of the developers. Failure can be forgiven, but only so many times. The comments saying "what about X update that had this feature I need?" are missing the point entirely. Instead ask yourself about all of the updates you've made without even looking at the patch notes, because there are just too many updates and not enough time. Instead of blaming the producers for creating a blackbox relationship with the consumers, we blame the consumer and blindly tell them to "just update." That's what needs to change. It's a bit similar to opaque ToS issues.

Re: Never Update Anything

#68

Post by hipadev23 »

stavros wrote: post #46
KronisLV wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am very much tempted not to because it works under lower loads, could just put it on a faster server, but how could I pass up the chance to write my own CMS (well, a better one than the previous ones I've done)? That's like a rite of passage. But yes, the irony isn't lost on me, I just had to go for that title.

If you have to write your own CMS, make it compile to static files. I did that with Django, used Django-distill, and it's hands down the best static site generator I've ever used. My site never needs updates and never goes down under any amount of load.

“static files” are nothing more than no-TTL caching strategy with manual eviction.

Re: Never Update Anything

#69

Post by stavros »

hipadev23 wrote: post #68
stavros wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have to write your own CMS, make it compile to static files. I did that with Django, used Django-distill, and it's hands down the best static site generator I've ever used. My site never needs updates and never goes down under any amount of load.

“static files” are nothing more than no-TTL caching strategy with manual eviction.

OK.
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