hi folks,
I know in advance I'm about to be chastised and castigated for what I'm about to write, but in fairness to me at least give this a read before passing sentence.

When R5A22 was released, I upgraded my KnoppMyth systems from R5A16 not knowing that I was installing an svn-branch of Myth. My bad. However, it worked so bloody well, and some soul was kind enough to write-up a Mac-frontend HowTo (thanks, Mark et al!), that I thought nothing of it.
Until R5A26 was released.
Egad, I'm fighting off the upgrade fairies, and they're EVERYWHERE!
So I upgraded last night, but in prolly the strangest way, and I'd like to share in an effort to gain a better understanding (Cecil, Dale, Human, Xsecrets, nigel...?) of KnoppMyth and Linux.
My upgrade path probably strays as far away from what would be considered normal that I hesitate to expose anyone else to it for fear they might laugh themselves to death or worse destroy their KnoppMyth setup, but here goes:
-my backend is an old Tyan Tsunami mobo, 850MHz PIII, 100MHz FSB
-20Gb 5400rpm IDE boot drive (/, /swap and /cache)
-ATTO SCSI PCI card
-4Gb 7200rpm SCSI drive (/var)
-180Gb 7200rpm SCSI drive (/myth)
-PVR250, FireWire/USB combo card, DCT6200, 10/100 NIC, nVidia GeForce2MMX AGP video card
I have been doing manual installs with this setup for the past two upgrades. It was a pain in the buttocks at first, but now I understand.

Basically, I upgrade by executing "mythbackup" as root, then I tar-up the /myth/backup directory and store it on a separate nfs-mounted volume.

Next, I'll boot from the upgrade CD and do a manual install of KnoppMyth, go through all the config screens but not bother with mythtv-setup (i.e., don't configure the capture devices, video sources, etc).

Next, I'll edit my fstab to include the nfs-mounts for my AV library (my movie and music collection is modestly...um...modest...).
I'll also do an apt-get update, configure and start Webmin, and maybe a couple of other utils like gkrellmd and x11vnc.

Reboot.

Next, I'll execute "mythbackup" as root.

Next, rename /myth/backup/mythconverg.sql to mythconverg.sql.orig.

I'll then copy the old mythconverg.sql database from the previous "mythbackup" to /myth/backup.

Execute "mythrestore" as root.

Reboot.

This worked last night, in the face of "don't do an auto-upgrade to R5A26 from R5A22, but then again I didn't do an auto-upgrade.
I did a goofy-upgrade.

Comments and criticisms are most welcome!:wink:

-Bob K.

I'm surprised this worked and wouldn't be surprised if you found some problems later on. In particular, did your Recordings all work after the "upgrade"? I though the issue with the upgrade from A22 to A26 was that A22 was released with an svn version of myth that had changes to the database format for recordings. Perhaps it is only a problem moving forward to a newer svn rather than back to the previous stable release.

Your procedure however might make some sort of a sensible template for "upgrading" to the next version KnoppMyth which will have a mythtv version that can no longer uses a separate partition for cache. Using thje KnoppMyth upgrade will not reclaim the space allocated to the /cache partition (it will be wasted unless you find another use for it). If you auto-install however (after stashing the backup somewhere), it will install without a /cache partition and then restoring the stashed backup should get you back where you were.

My recordings all carried over without incident or database-editing, which surprised me. I was expecting a complete meltdown.



No cache partition. Hmmm. That'll be interesting. Thanks for the comments and criticism. Taken to heart.

-Bob K

As a A22 user I wanted to see if the up-step to A26 is being looked at. Looks like you had success. If I may ask, Is it still working A ok?

I second that. I want to upgrade out of the A22 debalcle. Have you seen any freaky behavior out of your mythbox since upgrading?

Debacle?! You make is sound like it was a horrible release. Well thanks for pissing on the late nights that I put into it. R5A22 is simply the best release to date....

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

Waaaaate a second. Don't go putting works in my mouth. It is working great for me so far. No more problems then I had in the last release. But a hell of a lot easier install routine. I'm just worried that when I adventually transisition to a newer release I'll lose all my recordings. :-(

No one is putting words in your mouth. No you know the meaning of the word debacle? There are reasons, I stated that R5A22 users shouldn't update to R5A26...

You know, I actually deleated the word debacle when I was writing that post. But put it back in because I couldn't think of a more fitting word at the time. I freely admit that it doesn't fit the situation 100%. I'm sorry if my post souldn't like I was saying you totaly screwed the pooche with R5A22. That was not my intent.

sorry guys, i've been away for a few days.
the "upgrade" I did still works, but that's prolly because my /myth partition is on a separate drive and thus is not overwritten during the installation process (and thus, like Cecil has said, all the recordings and their associated files are still in place). Mythconverg can then find them when "mythrestore" is executed.

I'm busy hosing off the flames and ashes (!) from the other posts so I'll pipe down for awhile (Cecil, if you stop the late nights working on R5Ann, I'll personally get, like, really warped, and prolly hurt myself...dig?)

Err, I did this a few weeks ago and was given a good kicking on the Myth mailing list...

I copied /myth to a samba share, did a MySQL dump of Mythconverge, then manually installed A26 (so I could shrink the /cache right down to 2GB as I rarely watch Live TV and 2GB is good for an hour+), then restored the dump and copied back the /myth.

It worked like a champ, no recordings lost, no problems (apart from the MCE remote which is still hiccuping).

I really don't know what all the fuss is about.

Nice one Ces!