Topic: Breakdown of forums

[hamishau]

Hi all,

Suggestion (which has probably been made before): Break the root of the forums up into the distros which we use.

That is:
Basic forum for pre-5.6
Experienced user forum for pre-5.6
Basic forum for 5.6
Experienced User forum for 5.6
Basic forum for 6.x
Experienced user forum for 6.x

Feedback?

Hamish,
Melbourne, AU

[bobk]

A quote from Gordon Rowell:

"...anything before 6.0 should  be upgraded immediately, so it doesn't really matter, does it?"

[monkey]

Just wondering why people should upgrade immediately?

A server is not always the most accessable machine in an IT room to upgrade....

[RonM]

IMO, this comes down to a policy decision:

Do we have the resources to support older versions of SME (without hurting dev and new version support)?

If so, is there a real benefit to Lycoris and/or the community to do so?

Historically, users have been urged to upgrade relatively quickly (with a grace period, of course). Perhaps a CentOS/RHEL situation will change the equation.

BTW SME 6 final has been out for almost a year, and in beta3 several months before that. Gordon wrote that in devinfo at a point when everyone had had 6 - 8 months to schedule a minimum impact upgrade to 6.0 final.

This being said, I don't think it would hurt anything to create one < 6.0 support forum, and see if there are enough interested people to keep it active as a "community, not official" support resource.

[jcoleman]

Just wondering why people should upgrade immediately?

A server is not always the most accessable machine in an IT room to upgrade....

The primary reeason that 5.6 users should upgrade is security.  There were a number of issues with 5.x that were fixed in 6.x.

The most notable one that comes to mind is the OpenSSL exploit is applicable to the older versions.

While it is true that a savy admin could spend some time researching and upgrading individual packages, the version upgrade takes care of all of the issues at once and has the additional advantage of being currently supported for new features and errata.

-jeff

[monkey]

Its just a very bold statement.

I work in an enviroment where there are still NT 3.x and OS/2 boxes. They serve a purpose. Migrating the services off those to win2k3 or HP-UX or whatever can and usually is a major.

SME is not a desktop, its a server and moving to the next best version might be an option in some enviroments, but for some, it may not be as simple as saying "immediately".

I guess this is something that we (Lycoris) will address soon.

[guest22]

SME serves it's purpose...

It's and easy to install and maintainable SME product with a sophisticated features e.g firewall, on which many businesses depend their primary production evnivornment and security on.

As SME Server was being developed/marketed as a gateway (between local LAN and the Internet) updates are REALLY essential!

I guess that we (The community) are very interested in how to deal with our current deployments, based on Mitel and contribs.org promises (ISO's) and the Lycoris vision c.q. follow up.

[haynest]

I work in an environment where we have a builtin opportunity to upgrade. As a teacher, we have time in the summer when folks are off the machines, and it is easy to do a migration.

Having said that, it all gets done in a single afternoon with followup tweaking.

Security updates are critical for anything that is used as a gateway or firewall. I would like to see a service like yum which could be run to update security stuff daily.

In terms of support, I think Lycoris should probably decide how long to support a product after release and post updates for that period of time. I would not be so worried about < 5.6 whatever.

[girkers]

Two system admins are talking, one fresh out of tech school and says, "How about we update the SME server this weekend?"
The senior tech says "Sure and we are you starting work next week?"

I agree that you can do server migrations without forward planning, but in the same breath you can not deny progress.

The old saying still holds, if it ain't broke don't fix it.

I do like the idea of versioning for the forums, 5.x and 6.x, but the only problem with that is you may miss out on something you were not sure of.  What I mean is if something has been fixed in a later version or a new feature that has been put in to meet a need may get missed as it does not apply to the older versions.

Just my 20cents worth including GST.