Topic: A few stupid questions about upgrading from 7.6 to 8.0

[apple3feet]

I've been studying http://wiki.contribs.org/SME_Server_8#Upgrade_paths and various forum posts before upgrading our server, and I have a few questions - probably silly, but I prefer to be safe. 

We have a system with 2 identical 1.5T disks.  We don't want to change the hardware.  As I understand it, the safest way is to use a CD, and remove one of the disks before doing the upgrade.  I'll also be doing a full Workstation backup before I start.

(1)  We have a few contribs, and I understand that I should remove them before starting.  What's the best way to do that?

(2)  In the upgrade document, there's a short section on upgrading with a CD, and a longer section on upgrading with Yum.  I'm intending to use the CD method, and it's not clear to me how much of what follows is relevant - where does the "Yum only" bit finish, and the bit to be read by everyone start again?  For example, is the stuff about upgrading Samba relevant to everyone?  I get the impression it's only for people using betas..

(3) If I remove one disk before upgrading, and replace it afterwards, does SMEServer know which one to sync?  Could it end up reversing my upgrade?

[Frank VB]

(2) Use the CD upgrade method. Since you're upgrading from 7.6 you don't have to bother about the samba upgrade.

(3) After 1) backing up your data on an external USB drive AND 2) removing one of the disks, I would perform the upgrade. Then after upgrading you can insert a blank, new hard disk (it should be also 1,5 TB or bigger) and synchronize the drive. You can start the synchronization process by choosing the "Manage Disk Redundancy" option in the console menu.

Keep the second 7.6 disk as a backup just in case anything goes wrong with the upgrade. If you don't want to buy a new disk and want to reuse the old 7.6 disk you should wipe it clean (read the "Reusing Hard drives" section in http://wiki.contribs.org/Raid).

[genisys]

Frank is 100% correct, get a new disk and keep one for backup.  I didn't have that option when I upgraded our server from 7.6 to 8, so I did a workstation backup, put it on a USB stick and did a fresh install on the same hardware. It went great. Perfect I'd say.

I only had a few issues. One was with our website which was calling old versions of PHP on a "submit" form and so I had to find the references to that and remove them and also had to rebuild a very small MySQL database that I did not know existed prior to the re-installation for one our applications to function.  The other was the contribs, which were very easy to reinstall due to documentation and help from the forum here.

[janet]

apple3feet

(1)  We have a few contribs, and I understand that I should remove them before starting.  What's the best way to do that?

It is not strictly necessary to remove them. If they are compatible with sme8 then they (sme7/el4 versions) should be OK.
Check this link to see the status of many contribs.
http://wiki.contribs.org/SME8.0_Contribs_QA

Contribs that are not compatible are best removed before the system upgrade.

You can reinstall or update contribs to sme8/el5 versions individually after the upgrade (if required or necessary). Updating one at a time is a safer approach, as it avoids the potential to introduce multiple issues when upgrading many things (contribs) at once.

Remove with
yum remove contribname