[VoiceOps] Broadworks Patch Religion

David Hiers hiersd at gmail.com
Mon Feb 8 11:02:24 EST 2010


We can reason all we want to about this, but there is one large area
of unknowns...

Patch release notes are imperfect, and embarrassing secrets can exist
inside companies and code; one whisper from a trusted Broadsoft
employee is enough to nudge me down the  "patch everything" (aka "open
your mouth and close your eyes") maintenance path.


David





On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 5:24 PM, Justin Randall <jrandall at comwave.net> wrote:
> My original reply still applies to patch dependencies.
>
> IMHO if one needs certain patches to address negatively impacting
> behaviour, one looks into all of the dependencies required, perform the
> appropriate lab testing, and then deploy if all lab testing and
> pre-production soak periods have passed without problems.  If there are
> any problems in testing, one has to consider which bugs/behaviours are
> worse to live with for the time being and make a judgement call.
>
> Really it's all about trade-offs, some prefer to take the extra time and
> be more thorough and others like to take extra risks to be more nimble.
>
> I'm more in favor of being as thorough as possible and taking the time
> to ensure as smooth of a patch rollout as possible to mitigate as much
> risk as possible relating to new bugs and/or unwanted behaviours.
>
> Regards,
>
> Justin Randall
> -----Original Message-----
> From: voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org
> [mailto:voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org] On Behalf Of Jason Warner
> Sent: Wednesday, February 03, 2010 4:11 PM
> To: David Hiers; VoiceOps at voiceops.org
> Subject: Re: [VoiceOps] Broadworks Patch Religion
>
> The problem with this approach is that you get so far behind on patches
> that when you need to apply a specific patch you can't because of patch
> dependencies.  You often cannot apply only the patches you want because
> of this.  With as many patches released by Broadsoft, tracking the
> dependencies and which patches you need to apply in order to apply the
> patch(es) you need becomes problematic.  The longer you wait, the more
> problematic it becomes.
>
> -Jason Warner
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Justin Randall" <jrandall at comwave.net>
> To: "David Hiers" <hiersd at gmail.com>, VoiceOps at voiceops.org
> Sent: Wednesday, February 3, 2010 12:19:43 PM
> Subject: Re: [VoiceOps] Broadworks Patch Religion
>
> With almost any piece of vendor software, patching always carries the
> risk of introducing newer (and potentially more harmful) bugs.
>
> While Broadsoft does a good job of attempting to document the interfaces
> impacted by each patch, unless something is not working correctly in
> your deployment, it's probably best to go by the approach of "if it
> isn't broken, don't fix it".  I know they have an N-2 support policy but
> this is main release and service pack based so it's not like you
> couldn't get support or further patches for your issues because you
> haven't installed the latest patch bundle or AP.
>
> AFAIK on R16 you don't even need to upgrade SPs at all and can simply
> stick with the R16 main release and add whichever patches you require.
>
> Regards,
>
> Justin Randall
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org
> [mailto:voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org] On Behalf Of David Hiers
> Sent: Tuesday, February 02, 2010 3:00 PM
> To: VoiceOps at voiceops.org
> Subject: [VoiceOps] Broadworks Patch Religion
>
> For our entire history with BW, we've carefully researched and
> selected individual patches to apply based on the functions that we
> use and the issues that we see.
>
> BW explicitly states that "customers can pick and choose the patches
> they want", and they make it easy for us to do so.  This process has
> worked quite well for us so far.  It takes a good deal of effort to
> keep up with over 1 patch per day across the entire BW universe of
> products, but we've done it and had good results.
>
> Recently, the "open you mouth and close your eyes" idea has been
> advanced, in which we would apply ALL patches, regardless of function
> or issue.  We'd wait 30 days or so to let everyone else find the
> problems with the contents of the default patch bundle, then just slap
> the bundle on without any thinking.  We'd still test like chimps on
> crack after patching, of course.
>
> Are you picky or promiscuous with your BW patches?
>
> Since this discussion is very vendor/version specific, we run BW R14sp9.
>
>
> Thanks,
>
>
> David Hiers
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