Posted by campbg on June 12, 2014 at 12:56pm
Having a discussion with the IT group that hosts our Drupal installs. They are proposing a new monthly schedule of applying security patches to Linux hosts (RedHat), including patches to Apache, PHP, MySQL and suggesting we test of Drupal sites afterwards to ensure nothing is broken as a result of patching. I wonder if this additional testing is necessary. I would expect Drupal installs to remain stable as long as versions of Apache, PHP and MySQL don't change. Has anyone seen Drupal installs break as a result of OS security patching? Does anyone routinely test their sites after OS patches?
Comments
Security Patches
Interesting question to be sure. I can't think of an instance where a Drupal install has been affected by any patches to underlying infrastructure. I would tend to agree with you that so long as the supported versions, paths etc don't change there's should be an issue.
It may be that if you use custom modules that have dependencies on any of those elements, outside of the core Drupal code, that you may experience some difficulties but that would probably depend on a case by case basis.
Did they give you any reason as to why they think there may be issues?
Where I've seen this be a
Where I've seen this be a concern is in two scenarios:
It's always good to do some sort of sanity check after any foundational updates, but you likely aren't going to see issues if you have a stock install.
Thanks for comments
droddis, Ian, thanks for your replies. They didn't give a specific reason to be concerned other than stating that there was a small risk that updates could "on rare occasions" cause problems with Drupal modules. Perhaps just taking extra caution against the unknown. I'm not a security expert so I don't know if it is a common practice to stage OS security patches to a test server before applying them against production servers.
Barry, rarely do the updates
Barry, rarely do the updates ever have a problem. The main issue to be aware of is when you encounter a PHP upgrade such as 5.2 > 5.3 > 5.4 etc. Those can cause problems.
We update frequently and those are the only issues we've encountered in the past few years.
Ryan
Major Versions of php
I've had the same experience as rockitdev. The providers I deal with all seem to know that the php version change can cause issues and they send a heads up before any major version changes. Make sure you have a similar understanding with the IT group that hosts your installs.