Just a little reality check to share (and get off my chest)...

Last Friday we had planned, with HP account engineer, and update of our
K570 from HPUX 10.20 to 11.00.  This lead to a couple of days of prep by
both parties - moving non-essential filesystems away from vg00 (think
mpexl_system_volume_set), making notes, backups, ignite tapes (think
SLT/Store) and fbackup of vg00.

Friday arrives.  Spent 17 hours doing the install on one half of the
mirrored vg00 to leave the 10.20 part intact, resulting in a minimally
patched 11.00 kernel and no 3rd party products.  Turned out we had a bad
license key for MF Cobol, and were unsuccessful in obtaining a
workaround from the HPRC (it was after midnight by now), and networking
was barely working.  Looked like an impass, so we decided
to revert to 10.20 to have the machine up Saturday (adult student
orientation/fee payment).  But we goofed somewhere in the split, and the
10.20 partition was corrupt.  Ooops.

HPRC calls back with a MF Cobol emergency key.  We tried to boot the
11.00 side of the mirrors but it was similarly hosed.  Grrr... reload
the 10.20 ignite tape and by 4:00 AM we're back, after some last minute
network patchwork.

We tried again Sunday for 11.00.  Reload ignite tape for 11.00, redo
networking so it works right on bootup, import user volumes, copy
important user files back to vg00.  Attempted to install Oracle and
Legato.  Oracle won't run, complaining of shared memory. Change kernel
parms and reboot.  Now it won't run for semaphores.  Tried Apache, won't
run with shared libraries, static version seems to be OK.  Legato runs,
but can't find/manipulate DLT jukebox.  Jukebox API looks hosed.  OK, no
Legato, no Oracle, can't recompile Oracle apps, don't want to hose
Oracle DB.  Installed > 250Mb of patches from a Custom Patch Manager
bundle downloaded overnight.  Still no change.  Glance won't work,
system complains about DIAGMON and some other things, people are lining
up in fee payment.  Booted back to 10.20 at 1:30 PM today.

So, 25 hours x 4 people (Richard, myself, 2 HP SEs) Friday, 7 hours x 3
people (Richard, myself, 2 HP SEs) Sunday afternoon, 7 more hours x 2
people Sunday evening, an overnight download of a quarter-gig, and 4
more hours x 2 people today still hasn't updated us to 11.00.

Richard and I both took the afternoon off, and we're giving the beast
a two week reprieve (mainly due to production schedule) before trying
this again.

I want my MPE :-(

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>