[rt-users] Slightly OT: Perl Modules question

[scott smith]

John Arends wrote:
> There is one person here who feels very strongly about the RPM based 
> approach (not me) but I do agree that RT doesn't really get rebuilt very 
> often. Since we actually run it in a VM on top of ESX, I almost feel 
> like the kickstart isn't as necessary as I can make copies of the VM 
> files and feel reasonably comfortable that way. Kickstart is awful nice 
> when dealing with bare metal and being able to restore.
> 
> However I have restored exactly...never. So I'm not sure which way to go.
> 
> Here I am looking at going from 3.6.x to 3.8 and it basically involves 
> building a whole new machine. I can't imagine actually upgrading it in 
> place based on everything that has to be installed.

I initally set up our RT instance on a FreeBSD machine. It was pretty 
damn easy, took me like 10 minutes. Most of our production network is 
run on CentOS 5, however.

Late last year I set up a completely new kickstart environment which 
allowed us to fully automate 90-95% of the roll out process here. I was 
interested in setting up a new RT machine, as the one it's currently on 
is pretty old.

However, the sheer amount of work required to ensure the Perl module 
RPMs are of a sufficient version and stored in my local yum repo was 
enough that I spent multiple days downloading and building the RPMs. I 
later found cpan2rpm, which did help. Then I realized that the "set it 
and forget it" (thanks, Ronco) method I used was, in this single 
occasion, a much more efficient use of my resources to the company. 
We're not rolling out 20 new RT instances every week.

Since I set it up last September, I've upgraded RT three times on that 
machine and all it really required was ensuring my ports tree was up to 
date before trying to upgrade the Perl modules.

-scott