I had an interesting discussion yesterday, with a senior technologist, about the recent Drupal security update (that some members of the tech community are unkindly calling ‘a fiasco’).<\/p>\n
Oh, I understand the bitterness around the short-notice of the security update.<\/p>\n
And I understand the raised hackles around the ‘do this within six hours or consider your systems to be compromised’ message.<\/p>\n
But there’s a wider point about how we update our critical systems (and make no mistake, for a very large number of organisations, Drupal is a critical system).<\/p>\n
And that’s where I’d like to go with these thoughts.<\/p>\n
Mature (and that’s a key word) organisations require\u00a0their suppliers to produce a release schedule.<\/p>\n
Each release schedule will generate, for the users\/customers, a full set of release notes, prior to release publication.<\/p>\n
A good set of release notes will contain full details of all functional (and non-functional) changes.<\/p>\n
But that’s the release schedule model for routine updates.<\/p>\n
When urgent fixes are released (let’s assume we’re talking about infrastructure fundamentals here; operating systems and core application products such as databases, mailservers etc), they too should contain a good set of information about the change(s).<\/p>\n
Whether we, as decision-making technologists, choose to have our systems automatically process these updates (i.e. before we have read the release notes), or not, is up to us.<\/p>\n
It’s about how much control we choose to retain over our infrastructure.<\/p>\n
Do we want to read the release notes before we install the updates?<\/p>\n
It’s a personal thing.<\/p>\n
The critical point, though, is that we ensure we take a whole-system backup, before we apply the updates.<\/p>\n
I’m slightly OCD about my infrastructure.<\/p>\n
I like to read the release notes before I apply a fix – even if it’s an urgent fix – I like to know what I’m applying, and what changes it will make to my systems.<\/p>\n
And I’ll take an extra whole-system backup; everything from the operating system (but including the operating system) upwards, will get backed up and copied to a contingency location.<\/p>\n
My core infrastructure is RAIDed.<\/p>\n
So I’ll keep one compressed whole-system backup on the RAIDed infra.<\/p>\n
And I replicate that backup to an off-system location.<\/p>\n
But lately I’m wondering if I should introduce another layer.<\/p>\n
Maybe I should consider having my system back itself up to an external product?<\/p>\n
2TB.<\/p>\n
Hmm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I had an interesting discussion yesterday, with a senior technologist, about the recent Drupal security update (that some members of the tech community are unkindly calling ‘a fiasco’). Oh, I understand the bitterness around the short-notice of the security update. And I understand the raised hackles around the ‘do this \u2026 Continue reading