I’m a generalist SysAdmin. I use Linux when necessary or convenient. I find that when I need to upgrade a specific solution it’s often easier to just spin up an entirely new instance and start from scratch. Is this normal or am I doing it wrong? For instance, this morning I’m looking at a Linux VM whose only task is to run Acme.sh to update an SSL cert. I’m currently upgrading the release. When this is done I’ll need to upgrade acme.sh. I expect some kind of failure that will require several hours to troubleshoot, at which point I’ll give up and start from scratch. I’m wondering if this is my ignorance of Linux or common practice?
No, it’s the same on the Windows side. Personally I like to build a new one in parallel, then migrate. I do plenty of upgrades on desktops, but I don’t think I’ve ever done one on a server (except stuff like CentOS 7 to 8 where it’s not really that significant of a change).
Migration is the safe option, but if it’s a huge pain to migrate, I might do the in-place upgrade with a rollback plan ready if it really goes poorly.