in the process of upgrading our RH advance server 3.0 to AS 4.0 - it's being used as a webserver for our Oracle Financials
Only question is - say the upgrade failed to make the server to work? - How can I revert back to the old version of RH - in other words, is there an RH utility that works like an HPUX ignite-ux?

Thanks folks....

It is called a backup, if you don not have one then create and test one before upgrading.

You restore from the full system backup you took before beginning the upgrade.

Dave

We're using veritas netbackup - so, if all else fails with the upgrade of AS 4.0 from AS 3.0 - I can just perform a system restore from veritas netbackup and it'll wipe out the AS 4.0 and restore the old Operating system (AS 3.0) and everything else with it - and server should be back to the way it was, right?

You could just take an image copy of the necessary partitions wit "dd" and restore them if needed

Depends on how your backing it up. I highly doubt you are backing up every directory on the server. Most will only backup the data and applications that do not or are not part of the original OS.

This is called a Bare Metal Recovery.

So for instance, first check what you're backing up. If you're only backing up say /home, /etc and let's say /opt, that means you're only backing up the data that's needed.

If in case for a restore, what you'd do is reload AS3, then reload the data from the backups.

Perhaps you need to get with your backup administrator cause I certainly hope you are not the backup administrator if you're not sure what you are backing up with Netbackup. And dd is useless if you already have some type of backup, you'll just be wasting your time. If you have a spare machine, you may want to perform a test reload with the backups before proceeding.

Look hard drives are cheap, a lot less costly then your company's lifeblood. It should take less than a day to 'clone' your current system. I suggest you do so.

Yes a full metal (tested) backup is always a good idea. The suggestion of using a spare machine is also a good idea. Using a spare machine to 'test an upgrade' will insure your server is safe and available without any outages or other issues.

Cheap but it's not always an option. Perhaps reading the post and seeing that they already are using an Enterprise and expensive backup solution, why would they revert to buying hard drives to perform backups anyways? That defeats the whole purpose of spending thousands on Veritas Netbackup and probably the hardware it's using for the backups.

We generally run our system disks in RAID 1. When patching or upgrading we break the mirrors, and just upgrade on one side. If anything goes wrong, we just boot from the other side of the mirror and we're back in business without having to pull down from tape.

Good times.

Dave