Messaging Gateway

Hi All:

We are planning to upgrade in a month's time our BrightMail Gateway (2 scanners and 1 control center, all 8430 appliances) from 8.0.1-17 to the latest version 9.0.1.
We are aware that there is no direct path to v9 but have to upgrade first to 8.0.3 then 9.0.1.
As this is the first time our appliances get updated, we will test, try, and time the upgarde first on a spare appliance. I may need start with OSrestore (i have the 8.0.1.-7 iso), upgrade it to 8.0.1-17 and restore our latest backup. Then time the upgrade to v8.0.3 and then to v9.0.1

I am using this KB as a guide: Best practices for software updates on Symantec Brightmail Gateway Appliances
http://service1.symantec.com/support/ent-gate.nsf/docid/2007816671907998?Open&seg=ent
..and of course the Release Notes.

Any inputs and suggestions are most welcome. Thanks!

See this about dictionary issues on 8.03 to 9.01 updates.
Also, if you are doing LDAP sync now, it has totally changed and you may need new firewall rules.  Sync is gone, instead each scanner directly talks to LDAP.  I recommend enabling LDAP over SSL.   Watch out for cache errors in the logs (eviction notices). If you see this you need to up your LDAP cache size.

Existing compliance policies that use incident folders will create two folders (incident and quarantine) during the 9.0.1 upgrade.  You'll need to review your content policies and decide which you really want.

Read the section on command line tools, they have been reworked.

Thanks phhowe17 for the common pitfalls in upgrading to v9.0.1.

We are still in the planning-testing phase and one of our points of discussion is whether to upgrade to 8.0.3 first. Then wait for a month or two before we jump to v9.0.1. The one month is for stabilization period, enablling of TLS, and additional planning for v9.0.1 upgrade.

Our environment is not using the LDAP feature. So I guess one less problem to watch out.

We will review those Compliance Policies and CLI tools.