I just completed an upgrade (on Windows 2000) and get the feeling I'm breaking 
new ground.  From what I read in the release notes, it sounded like you could 
just upgrade the master server then do more later, starting with the media 
servers, then the admin consoles, and finally the clients.  Well, I did our 
master and two dedicated media servers (which went fairly well), but then the 
remaining media servers wouldn't work: the jobs using them failed with an error 
43, unexpected message received.

Fortunately, I only had three other media servers, so I went ahead and upgraded 
those too, which cured that problem.  At that point, everything appeared to be 
working as expected: backup jobs ran (on all the non-upgraded clients), 
restores worked fine, etc.

Since then, I've had some problems with the new admin GUI though - I think it's 
more than just a bit flaky.  Although I wasn't too fond of the old Windows GUI, 
I think now I want it back.  Some of the oddities:

1.  When viewing all the tape drives, you can "change" one of them (to bring up 
the properties) before the GUI had actually connected to the device manager on 
the media server.  This causes the tape device name field to be blank; if you 
fill it in, you'll get an error.  So, wait until all the information is 
populated before bringing up the properties.

2.  Sometimes the device monitor reports (especially when you refresh the 
screen) that "Device Manager Down" even when it isn't.

3.  Sometimes you can't "up" or "down" a drive without getting an error.

4.  When trying to add a new client to a backup policy, I received an error 42. 
 Somehow (possibly through user error trying command line utilities, although I 
know I never chose "delete" as an option) the backup policy subsequently got 
deleted and had to be recreated from scratch.  (Fortunately I could get the 
original machine list from the log files.)

5.  I ran the "cat_convert" program to convert the old text-based catalog files 
to binary catalog files (an optional step), in place recursively.  I don't 
recommend doing this: it kicked out quite a few catalogs as being "invalid 
ASCII format" and instead of just leaving them there unchanged it replaced them 
with an empty file, making browsing for files to restore impossible.  Worse, it 
didn't tell me which ones.  I ended up restoring all of the old catalogs from 
an NTBACKUP "just-in-case" backup of the entire master server before I started 
the upgrade.

That's all I've found so far, in the first three days...

-Michael Niehaus
 IT Consultant
 Marathon Oil Company


-----Original Message-----
Date: Thu, 16 May 2002 13:55:28 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Jeff A. Earickson" <jaearick AT colby DOT edu>
To: Veritas Netbackup List <veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu>
Subject: [Veritas-bu] upgrade from NB 3.4 to 4.5?

Y'all,

    Has anybody made the leap from Netbackup 3.4 to 4.5 already?  How did
it go?  I run 3.4 on a Solaris box and my copy of 4.5 landed on my desk
today.  I'm wondering what pain lies ahead for me.

** Jeff A. Earickson, Ph.D                         PHONE: 207-872-3659
** Senior UNIX Sysadmin, Information Technology    EMAIL: jaearick AT colby DOT 
edu
** Colby College, 4214 Mayflower Hill,               FAX: 207-872-3076
** Waterville ME, 04901-8842