Help on upgrading from IRIX 3.2 to 3.3 on a PI

[Ashley Dreier]

shenkin at cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Peter S. Shenkin) writes:


>I'm about to upgrade from 3.2 to 3.3 on a 4d25tg.  Since I've never upgraded
>an OS, I have a few questions that are not addressed in the "Release and
>Installation Notes."  In addition to answering the specific questions that I am
>about to ask, I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me about any "gotchas" you
>came across while trying to do the same thing;  i.e., if you could also
>answer the questions I wasn't smart enough to ask, I'd appreciate that, too.

>Q2.  The installation notes tell me to make full backups before installing the
>new system software, but they do not say that I need to restore anything
>after I do the installation.  Do I take this to mean that this should not
>be necessary?  (If I shouldn't have to do a restore, then probably Q3 is 
>irrelevant.)

Well, you can either make a complete backup or a partial backup. By a 
partial backup, I mean only backup files which have been altered since
the machine 'came alive'.  That way, you are only saving any new files
which have been added or altered. Any files which are as old as the system
will either stay the same, or be updated by the update. The will save a 
lot of time, especially if you have a large system.
The reason for macking a backup is that an upgrade is potentially dangerous,
in that it may cause the system to crash, or worse, destroy the file
system (although it's never happened to me, but I've been told about it).
In other words, it's just a safety measure in case something happens.


>Q3.  If it is necessary to restore part of the system, is there any way to 
>make sure that I don't over-write files that 3.3 has created with the old
>3.2 versions in the course of doing the restore? There doesn't seem to be a 
>bru option to extract all files except where a file of the same name already
>exists, and it seems to me that the restore would be very difficult
>without some simple way of doing this.  For example, I have put tcsh into
>/bin, but there are certainly going to be things in /bin that are updated
>by the new OS;  therefore I can't just restore /bin.  Do I have to restore 
>the individual files, such as tcsh, that I have added to directories, such as 
>/bin, that touched by the upgrade? (I hope not, because I'm not sure I can 
>remember what they all are!)  Also, how about files that pre-existed, but
>that I had to change by hand, such as /etc/hosts and sendmail.cf?  Do I
>have to have a list of what all these are?

Get a listing of the files you had just backed up, and get a listing of files
modified during the update. Just compare these to let you know which ones
are safe to restore.

		Ash
		(ajd at cs.mu.OZ.AU).