Secure upgrades

[mortenmathiasen]

Great tools exist to upgrade OS, WHM and cPanel to keep installations up to date.

Each time doing these upgrades I fear that the server will break, for good reasons!
How do you guys handle these upgrades smoothly and secure without clients getting interrupted?

What is your best advice to do these upgrades?
- just click the upgrade button and see what happens - hope for the best?
- use some smart tricks that enable roll-back of a failed upgrade?
- backup entire server to ensure that a failover server is ready when an upgrade fails?

 

[andrew.n]

Are these cPanel updates? What kind of upgrades are we talking about? yum?

 

[cPRex]

If we're talking about cPanel updates, it is as simple as just clicking the button. Nothing else needs to be done.

If you need to upgrade the operating system itself, the nightly cPanel update does run a "yum update" command to keep your packages updated.

If you need to upgrade the major version of the OS, such as from CentOS 6 to 7, we recommend performing a full migration to the new system.

 

[mortenmathiasen]

Thanks! Soon upcoming upgrades are:
1) cPanel version .100
2) AlmaLinux will replace CentOS
Do I need some kind of backup, rollback or failover strategy in place before running these upgrades?

 

[cPRex]

Version 100 has already been moved to the Release tier, which you can see here:

Downloads | cPanel, Inc.

layer1.cpanel.net

I would expect that to reach Stable sometime in the next few weeks.

If you're running CentOS 7, that operating system will continue to be supported until 2024. Your operating system will not ever get automatically updated to a newer major version, although Yum will update the system packages on your machine. More details on that can be found here:

https://support.cpanel.net/hc/en-us/articles/1500000436241-How-long-will-CentOS-7-and-CloudLinux-7-be-supported-by-cPanel-End-Of-Life