[K12OSN] Upgrade FC1 and 2 to K12LTSP 4.4.1 Lessons Learned

[Timothy Legge]

Hi All

I thought I would pass along the lessons learned from this past weekends 
upgrade of two ltsp servers to the latest k12ltsp.

General Description:

This was a full install formatting all partitions except the home 
partition, one server was backed up completely via amanda (more on that 
later) the other simply had etc, var, tftpboot and root tarred and 
zipped and copied to the home partition (actually done on both)

My basic procedure:

Create Backup Directory on home
Backup lts.conf
Backup etc directory
Backup root directory
Backup tftpboot directory
Cleanup var directory
Backup the var directory:
Print df -h output
Print fdisk output
Install defaults, manual disk partition, format all partions except /home
Copy paste normal users back to passwd and shadow
Copy and paste required customizations to lts.conf, dhcpd.conf, hosts
Restore special sis.zrom to /tftpboot

General Result

In general it was a smashing success.  Within an hour you could login to 
each server with the user id from a terminal

Leasons Learned

1) Windows is a pain.  I spent significant time trying to figure out why 
samba as a domain controller on one of the servers was not working 
correctly with a Windows 2000 server.  The windows server would not 
allow my users to login to w2k with the samba domain user and password.

Apparently windows uses some id for the domain that is only accessible 
by exporting it with a samba tool and restoring it to the new server. 
Yes, that is obvious in hindsight and removing and re-adding the win2k 
server to the domain fixed it.

2) selinux is a pain.  I spent significant time trying to figure out why 
samba as a domain controller on one of the servers was not working 
correctly with a Windows 2000 server.  The windows box could see the 
shares but could not figure out the network they were on.  Google point 
me to disabling selinux for all samba uses.

3) Windows is a pain II.  After the users could connect, they could not 
save settings (like mapped shares).  Again significant time was lost 
until I decided to delete the users profile from the win2k server and 
the profiles share on the samba box.

4) Evolution is a pain.  If you are going to change the location/format 
of folder and configuration in 2.0 of your product the following rules 
should apply.

	1) Always offer (no force) a backup of the current setup.
	2) Do not ever fail part way through
	3) If you do fail part way through offer a link to a manual fool proof 
method
	4) If you do fail, fail gracefully and provide debugging information 
for what went wrong (3 out 7 failures is not a good record)

5) Evolution is a pain II.  Just because you are trying to replicate the 
functions of MS Outlook don't be stupid about it.  Account setting for 
an email program belong with the email program not in some registry like 
gconf file god knows where that gets overwritten if you do something 
like reset-default-desktop.

6) Amanda tape backups are great as long as you have a copy of all files 
in /var/lib/amanda.  Your copy of these files must be made after the 
final backup or the individual files on the tape are not retrievable 
(yes a amrestore will work but you need the log files and index files 
for the final backup to use amrestore to retrieve files from that tape).

7) (as above) reset-default-desktop removes evolution email account settings

So overall the upgrade went well.  Most everything seems to work well 
(except sound and local usb storage but I haven't spent much tim on it 
yet...)

Tim