[OpenAFS] XDR_integer overflow and IBM/Transarc AFS issues

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

On Fri, 9 Aug 2002 cball@bu.edu wrote:

> I'm still running v3.5 IBM/Transarc database servers as that's the last
> version for which we have sources.  The good news is that the XDR patches
> easily apply so I'll be set for this particular event as soon as we've
> completed testing and deploy the new build.  OTOH, back-porting patches
> isn't a long term strategy.
>
> Has anyone encountered issues with a transition from Transarc to openafs
> database servers?  In particular, is the 3.5 -> 3.6 database upgrade code
> still in openafs or is it necessary or desirable to upgrade to Transarc
> 3.6 prior to switching to openafs?  Also, is it safe to simply upgrade the
> database server binary given an intact database or is it preferable to add
> openafs servers to (and remove transarc servers from) an existing cell?

NEVER mix database server versions unless you know exactly what you are
doing.  If you mix dbservers that expect different database formats, you
will get a corrupted database.

It should be perfectly safe to replace AFS 3.5 dbservers with OpenAFS ones
all at once.  In fact, I just upgraded my ptserver and vlserver this
morning from AFS 3.3a to OpenAFS 1.2.6.  The automatic VLDB conversion
works just fine (Even as old as 3.3a uses VLDB version 3; the current
version is 4), and we have had no problems so far.

Of course, I did shut down the servers and make copies of the database
files before starting up the new ones.