Hello,
You can most certainly upgrade from 4.2/6.2 directly to 6.3. The Installing and Upgrading document is good, and as long as it is followed precisely, you shouldn't run into any problems. I see failed or partially failed upgrade cases come in now and then, and almost everytime, it is because one of the serveral steps was overlooked. It is not hard to miss a step.
As you already know, you can find the upgrade manual here. Below are some tips that will hopefully give you a little more confidence to make the leap.
- Make sure that you perform the steps to Upgrade, not install. The upgrade precedure is outlined at the bottom of the document.
- Step 1 is a good idea, so be sure to perform your backups first.
- Step 2 is simply stopping your services, which will obviously stop the camera feeds, archiving, etc.
- Step 3 is just removing any Java rpms. You'll install the one that comes with 6.3 later.
- Step 4 is simply verifying that you've removed the Java
- Step 5 just allows you to see all the rpms that are installed and contain Cisco in their names.
- Step 6 calls for you to remove each one. You can actually combine the command in step 5 with the command in step 6 to remove all the Cisco rpm files in one command:
rpm -qa | grep -i cisco | xargs rpm -e
The above command will first list all rpms with cisco in the name (-i means case insensitive) and pass all the names to rpm -e which removes them all.
- Step 7 is to follow steps 1 thorugh 6 of the installation. Here, you reinstall your Java from the rpm that comes with 6.3. You'll verify the symbolic link for java is properly configured, and then you will install all of the 6.3 rpms. Assuming you've extracted all of your VSM rpm files into a single directory, you can install all of them in a single command as follows:
rpm -ivh Cisco_*.rpm
IMPORTANT: At this time you need to go back to the upgrade process. DO NOT proceed to step 7 of the installation steps. Remember, you are doing an upgrade ;- )
- Step 8 is where you will update the MySQL database. Note that if you went onto the next step in the install, you would've created the database.
- Step 9 is to restart the services
/etc/init.d/cisco start
When finished, I like to add two more commands for verification:
/etc/init.d/cisco status
vscheck
If there are any processes that aren't running after the first command, then try restarting them with the following command:
/etc/init.d/cisco restart
The vscheck command will show you the installed files and should now all show 6.3
I hope this helps you feel a little more comfortable with your upgrade.
Thanks,
Sean
