Upgrade advice

[Jack Elliston_1]

I have a HP 712/60 workstation running HPUX 9.4

This machine is our primary DNS server and I plan on upgrading the machine very
soon. There is nothing on the machine that I need to keep other than the
config info for named.

My question is:

Since the only thing that will be running, initially, on this machine after the
upgrade, is there any problem going directly to HPUX 11? If not, where can I
find instructions?

Thanks,
Jack

[Neil Gast_1]

There is no direct upgrade path for a 9.x to 11.x transition, so you'll need to
do a complete OS re-install:
1. Back up your named data files. In fact, it might not hurt to do a complete
system backup as well (just in case). It is, after all, your primary DNS
server.
2. Boot from 11.x CDROM, and install according to instructions.
3. Reconfigure for your network, restore your named data files, enable NAMED
(/etc/rc.config.d/namesvrs).

You might want to check out the differences between the version of named on the
9.x OS versus the version that runs under 11.x. There may be some differences
you'll need to deal with.

I hope you have enough memory on this box (64MB or more). HP-UX 11.x uses a bit
more resources than 9.x did.

MrNeil

[Anthony Goonetilleke_1]

I recently wanted to upgrade a version of 9.x to 10.20 (for Y2k etc) but the
proccess was too long as I had to first go to 10.x something and then upgrade
it to 10.20
I found it much easier to blow the whole machine away and put 10.20 on. I
would be very careful about using 11 as it is very resource hungry and unless
you have a very specific reason I would stick with 10.20 to gain decent
performance out of older machines.

regards,
AG

[Jason Luginbuhl_1]

First I wanted to clarify what OS is running on this box. There was no 9.4 OS
release. There was a 9.04 which was only for Servers (series 800's). Assuming
that it is running one of the series 700 9.X releases like 9.01, 9.03, 9.05, or
9.07, the comments from the other gentlemen are quite accurate. Both 10.X and
11.X are much larger operating systems than 9.X. You may need to add disk space
to allow for the installation of these other OS revisions and it may be wise to
add memory for better performance.

The upgrade process from 9.X to 10.X is quite cumbersome. The filesystem
architectures are totally different, so it requires you to analyze any and
every hard coded path that existed on your current system. Many administrators
spent months planning and debugging this upgrade before performing it. Judging
from your description it appears that we are looking for a "quick and dirty"
solution. In that case, the cold install of 10.20 or 11.0 seems like the best
choice. Also keep in mind that you may be dealing with different versions of
bind so that just "copying" over your DNS maps may not necessarily work. 9.X
and 10.X ship with BIND 4.8.3. Patches for 9.X and 10.X allow versions of BIND
4.9.7. The 11.0 OS ships with either 4.9.3 or 4.9.7 and can be updated to
8.1.2. Depending on the revisions you are dealing with, backing up and
restoring your map files may not solve your problems.

Assuming that just copying over your DNS mapfiles will not work, then the
quickest and safest method would be to:
1) Install the CORE OS (10.20 or 11.0)
2) Install Patches (Extension SW and Y2K Patches)
3) Edit /etc/hosts to contain the IP addresses of every system you want
included in your DNS maps. You can either recover this from your 9.X box or
manually add the entries yourself.
4) Run hosts_to_named to generate the DNS maps. Consult the man pages on
hosts_to_named(1M) for more info.