RE: CVS server upgrade?

[Jim.Hyslop]

Courier [mailto:address@hidden wrote:
> Here is I would like to do: I will take currently cvs server off line,
> then tar the whole Repository, then bring up a new system and 
> cp and untar
> Repository on new server. Our cvs server is a stand alone 
> server. All my
> users are accessing via pserver. I don't have any problems 
> with username
> and their password migrations, but just concerned about cvs 
> Repository.
When we upgraded our server, we took a similar approach. 

We scheduled a dry-run of the process ahead of time, just to make sure there
were no problems and to work out any unforeseen problems. The dry run proved
very valuable, because there _were_ some minor things we had overlooked.
This saved us the time (and embarassment) of cutting off our users from the
repository multiple times.

In order to minimize the impact on the users, we took the original server
off-line just long enough to create the tarball. As soon as the tar was
complete, we restarted the server in read-only mode (create an empty
CVSROOT/writers file to make the whole repository read-only). Thus, people
could still check out and browse the repository, but they couldn't check
anything in (and thus throw the two repositories out of sync).

After we were satisfied the new server was up and running properly, we
simply did a DNS switch on the server name (the name the users see is an
alias to the actual machine name).

-- 
Jim Hyslop 
Senior Software Designer 
Leitch Technology International Inc. (<http://www.leitch.com/>) 
Columnist, C/C++ Users Journal (<http://www.cuj.com/experts>)