Folks,

I sometimes have problems when I perform package upgrades or when the latest kernel comes out. Case in point, I rebooted Friday evening to get the latest kernel with security patches and my IP address was no longer getting assigned. Linode tech support was great, instant responses, but I had 24 hours where my clients' websites were down. One of them is upset because Google dropped her site from the index when they tried to crawl her site and couldn't reach it.

What I'd like to do is clone my partition and boot it separately with a different IP address while the main machine is still running. That way I can perform updates and upgrades with the auxiliary "machine" and verify it's all working correctly, then shut it down and boot my main "machine" (with the DNS mapped IP address) using the newly updated partition.

To do this do I just need to purchase a second IP address? Or do I need to purchase a second Linode plan? Is it possible to share partitions between Linodes or would I have to copy them across the internal network (yucky)?

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We're all in for it; please shut the door.

You can set up an HA option, I believe there's information on the wiki.

But as for 100% uptime, this is unrealistic and IMO nothing but a marketing ploy. You will always have a small amount of downtime ranging from scheduled maintenance windows to outages.

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Where "Thought Crime" is commited
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I'd add a temporary second Linode to your account in order to bring your system up to date. With the image cloning and IP swap utilities I'd think you can streamline the process to a minimal amount of downtime. When you remove the second Linode form your account, you receive a prorated credit for the unused time - you only pay for what you've used.

-Tom

And, if you buy a third IP, you can move it between servers with zero downtime.

Thanks everyone, I think I'll subscribe to a second Linode for when I want to do upgrades, updates, or experiment with new packages.

I can clone partitions to other Linodes so that will make it easy. Clone to second Linode, perform updates and test, copy it back to a new partition on my main Linode and reboot the main Linode with the updated partition. Sweet!

The prorated credit option is great! If I'm short on cash I'll just cancel the second Linode after my upgrades are done.