Forum .LRN Q&A: Guidelines on how to upgrade dotLRN

Dear all,

we plan to upgrade dotLRN in January. Therefore I seek your advice. Also my hope is that this thread will serve as a knowledge pool for others interested in the upgrade.

Here our current system:

Aolserver 3.x
PostgreSQL 7.3.4
SuSE Linux Prof. 9.1

We have 5.000 active users and 25.000 registered accounts and the system is in productive use since Nov. 2003.

Any summary of steps taken place, the problems faced and the solutions found during an upgrade to 2.1 would help.

For instance
- How should bug-tracker be upgraded?
- Are there any problems with content-repository?
- Which packages have no upgrade script?
- What about AOLServer 4 and SSL? Is it already working and what steps have to be taken for that upgrade?

Please post your experience here. Thank you very much in advance.

Greetings,
Nima

Malte,

thank you very much for your guidelines.

Here is what I have
- bug-tracker 1.3d
- dotlrn 2.0.3
- acs-kernel 5.0.4 (like most of the OACS packages)

Is the upgrade of AOLServer and PostgreSQL necessary? Why should I dump the database (except for backup purposes) and run it on 7.4.6? Won't the upgrade work otherwise?

So should we simply replace the packages folder with the latest from oacs-5-1 branch on a running test system and then use the APM? But what exactly should I use in APM? The only

I normally use the upgrade link on /acs-admin/install but I guess that is exactly what we shouldn't do? Why is that?

Greetings,
Nima

How should I use APM?

APM page offeres the following links:
- Create a new package
- Write new specification files for all installed, locally generated packages
- Load a new package from a URL or local directory.
- Install packages

Clicking on a package I am only offered the sections:
- package information
- manage
- reload
- xml .info package specification file
- disable/unistall

I cannot see any upgrade link. So how do you upgrade packages from APM? Via "Reload this package" or "Install packages." link?

Greetings,
Nima

Thank you. Why do we have several ways to install/upgrade packages in OpenACS? Wouldn't it make sense to have one working solution? I know this is not the right thread to ask but the UI of APM seems confusing to me. Maybe we can tune that up a little.

Actually we have found some callback problems (that do not happen if you do the same by *-drop.sql), but not exactly related to .LRN but as general bug in openacs. For instance, before-uninstall simply is not executed. We'll post them in the bug-tracker.

Hi, I finished the upgrade from 2.0.3 to 2.1.0b4  http://unis.galileo.edu 

 Here are some steps i followed:  
 (I am using cvs, postgresql) 

 Before upgrading the live site, create a copy of your site, a dump, to test
 and fix the problems with the upgrade scripts and your database. 

 - Make a tag of your working code or copy to a secure place. 
   I used
           cvs -q tag nameofyourtagdate

 - Make a dump of your database.

           pg_dump database > todaydate.dump    (verify the instruction for user or host)

 - Make a copy of  content-repository-content-files  if your store file in file
system instead of database.

           cp -r content-repository-files    .. . . 



Testing

  - Clean the new database you will create to test

          dropdb databasename 

  - Create the new database

          createdb -E UNICODE  databasename

  - Fill the database with the dump

          psql -f todaydate.dump  databasename


  - Get the working code

          cvs checkout  -r nameofyourtagdate

          or

          cp -r workingcode .... 


   - Remember to change the config.tcl   (ip, port, dbname, ...)

   - Copy the content-repository-files

   - Start the site


   Get the new code

     Get the fresh code, change your specific files, etc ...
     Use cvs for more convinience ..

     cp -r /path/newcode  .  

     or

     cvs -q update -dA  


   - Now browse to  /acs-admin/apm/packages-install

   - Check the new packages to install/upgrade and wait ...

     If there are errors, write the upgrade script and try to fix it or
     post the problem.   And start again  (dropdb, ...  )


   - If no errors, restart the server  (remember to check the config.tcl)


   - Login again and reload many times your browser (the css may be cached)


   - Check the old information ...



   With the new working code upgrade your live site.
   just update and install packages.



 Problems i had: 
dotlrn:
    tcl/apm-callback-procs.tcl

    I changed the apm_upgrade_logic from  2.0.3 2.1.0  to  2.0.3 2.1.0b4

 workflow:
    upgrade-1.2-2.0d1.sql

    I had a problem with this script because it alters a table:

    alter table workflow_fsm_action_en_in_st add constraint
    workflow_fs_action_en_in_st_pk primary key (action_id, state_id);

    The instruction crash because i had duplicate rows, I deleted the
    rows,

    delete from workflow_fsm_action_en_in_st where action_id='4'; ...

    Check the table before running the script.


file-storage:
   upgrade-5.1.0a6-5.1.0a7.sql

    I had a problem with a constraint, but it was a problem with a
    row in my system, i searched the row and change a title.


   static-portlet:
   upgrade-2.0.3d1-2.0.3d2.sql

    This script was not run in the upgrade, check if it is in the
    list of scripts to run, if not run it manually after the upgrade.

   psql -f      packages/static-portlet/sql/postgresql/upgrade/upgrade-2.0.3d1-2.0.3d2.sql ....  



   Greetings,
   Hector