Netbackup 6.5.4 upgrade using Sun patches - IMPORTANT!

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up, so that they don't run into the same nightmare as i did when upgrading from 6.5.3 to 6.5.4.. I had a fun 30 hour day getting bounced around the world with support only to go back to my initial suggestion of reverting to a catalog backup. With the addition of the db_marker.txt file and the behavior of the sun patchadd it can cause a nightmare if you are symlinking your db/images to another location..

the following applies if you are installing the upgrade using the patches provided by Sun..

If the following conditions are true, people need to take extra care when performing the upgrade using the Sun patches
• You are symlink’ing <install location>/openv/netbackup/db/images to another location
• And/or you are symlink’ing <install location>/openv/db/staging to another location
• you are upgrading by using the Sun Netbackup 6.5.4 patches (ie 127655-04)

If these are true, you should take the following steps
• Do not start the Netbackup services back up at the completion of the patchadd
• Copy the <install location>/openv/netbackup/db/images/db_marker.txt file to their correct images location
• Remove the <install location>/openv/netbackup/db/images and <install location>/openv/db/staging dirs and recreate the symlinks to point to the correct location for the images and staging db’s
• Start netbackup

Or the best solution would be to install the 6.5.4 upgrade from the install files provided by Symantec. These installers do not break the pre-existing symlinks to the images DB, so the problem that we experienced would not happen. The only thing that we noticed with the Symantec upgrade was that the <install location>/openv/db/staging link did disappear, so that would need to be recreated prior to starting netbackup back up.

If you do not do this and are using the sun patches to upgrade, what happens is that once the first image cleanup process runs, it will expire all of your media since it does not see your image database anymore. This is due to the fact that the symlink to the images DB is broken, and a new empty directory is created in its place. This can be problematic, as the image cleanup doesnt run right away, so unless you catch it before your tapes start to get overwritten, the potential for data loss is huge....