I have a perfect system ISPConfig (jessie) powered, and I have to say it is working great! ...but it suddenly warned me that I had to do some system updates. So far so good, but I'm a little worried about the options... Do it from the ISPConfig interface: it says that it will use aptitude... all my installs updates until now were done with apt-..., and it is not good practice to mix the two. Also, it mentions the "-y" option, what about ISPConfig special configs, does it looks about them after the update? Do it from console: This way, I'll see which software wants to override previous conf files, ok, so I can make note of that but what do I have to launch after some update has reverted its config file? Production concern: as my server is mainly a mail server, I'm quite anxious that if mess happens during OS upgrade, I'll have to roll back to the previous backup (a few minutes ago), but even a few minutes ago might have leaked some mail any user mailbox, and if I rollback, this mail will be lost. I know of the "maintenance mode" in interface/main config/misc, but it doesn't prevent mail from coming while I'm doing the upgrade, and if any mail gets through, and I have to rollback for any reason, this mail will be lost forever... Explain that to the customer. What is the recommended way of updating the system (needed, at least monthly, but weekly sometimes, as there might be security fixes) securely, I mean, the upgrade might fail, but we can safely go back from a backup?
Just run: apt-get update && apt-get upgrade on the shell. I use this on my production servers for 10+ years and never had any issues on an ISPConfig setup with that.
Worked flawlessly, no questions asked. Just to be sure: I guess that ISPConfig (using the perfect server install), doesn't change anything to the default config files, so that I won't have the dreaded question asking if an update should overwrite its config or keep the outdated one?
ISPConfig changes some default config fles, but Debian and Ubuntu updates don't collide with that (unless you do a dist-upgrade). In case of a dist-upgrade (upgrade to the next major version of the OS), you can either choose to not overwrite config files of services managed by ISPConfig or you let apt overwrite them and then run and ispconfig update afterwards and let ispconfig ad it's modifications again.
Sorry if I'm dense, but one last question: is ispconfig_update.sh the script to execute in case of config overwrite?
yes. Or you do a manual update by download the ispconfig tar.gz, unpack it and then run the update.php script in the install folder.
