ISO for patch releases?

[farmox]

Hi,

Now there's an effective method for automating the install of PVE, it would be good to be able to use a cattle-not-pets approach to operating PVE by deploying the ISO from scratch instead of patching it. I want the confidence that comes with repeatably returning to a known state: specify an exact version, and then have that be deployed from bare-metal. Currently that is not possible, except for the "#.#-1" release. Can only deploy the "#.#-1" ISO, then have the option of typing "apt-upgrade..." if you want to arrive at a mystery patch version. I'd prefer to cleanly and precisely control which patch version is deployed. Phoenix servers > snowflake servers. Immutable infra FTW.

Thanks for considering this improvement.

 

[MagicFab]

Perhaps you could go about this by using the "pinning" of packages in Debian (which Proxmox runs on).

This may provide a hint about it:

https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2020-downgrade-debian

 

[leesteken]

I think that the closest you can get to a fixed version at the moment is using a POM: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-offline-mirror-released.115219/

 

[farmox]

@MagicFab, from reading that link, pinning requires knowledge of the date of the release. Operating own POM requires engineering and storage. There's a good reason most OSs (Linux distros) release ISOs for patch versions. I hope Proxmox VE will start doing the same.

 

[fabian]

we sometimes release new versions for individual packages multiple times a week, we will not generate fresh ISOs and validate them for each package bump, that is not feasible. if you want to deploy a fixed set of package versions, POM is the way to go.

 

[aabraham]

Hi,

Now there's an effective method for automating the install of PVE, it would be good to be able to use a cattle-not-pets approach to operating PVE by deploying the ISO from scratch instead of patching it. I want the confidence that comes with repeatably returning to a known state: specify an exact version, and then have that be deployed from bare-metal. Currently that is not possible, except for the "#.#-1" release. Can only deploy the "#.#-1" ISO, then have the option of typing "apt-upgrade..." if you want to arrive at a mystery patch version. I'd prefer to cleanly and precisely control which patch version is deployed. Phoenix servers > snowflake servers. Immutable infra FTW.

Thanks for considering this improvement.

Alternatively, you could use a command like apt list --installed > pkgs.txt to list all installed packages and "freeze" them in a text file, similar to pip freeze.