About servers with no AVX support, you think it's better to have no mongodb at all, or keep an old version around?

[malvim]

Hi,

This week I went through a very painful cloudron and server upgrade process, and it got me thinking about this. I was running ubuntu 18 (gasp!) and an old version of cloudron that still supported no-AVX servers (bc it used mongodb 4.x).

I ended up messing around with box code, mainly updater.js and infra.js, disabling the AVX check code, patching the downloaded box code to use an old version of mongodb, it was very hacky and I don't recommend it (though it did work).

So now I'm on version 8 and since I have no apps that use mongodb, all is well.

But it got me thinking if maybe there should be a way of running older versions of services, instead of just disabling them. Now, I can't shake the feeling that it's probably a bad idea, but also can't really put my finger on why exactly it is bad.

Just wanted to know people's thoughts on this here on the forums.

Thanks!

[nebulon]

If there are no security issues with older versions of software stacks, then there is no general issue with that. The main issue comes with exploding complexity around testing updates and the more different versions of packages, services, ... you have installed, the more likely it is to fall into a gap. So in those decisions we try to find some okish pragmatic middleground. In this case servers without AVX are very few and all newer ones basically have it, so with some perspective that particular issue will be gone anyways (on top of that, very few apps rely on mongodb)

[malvim]

Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks for the answer!