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From: shenkin@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Peter S. Shenkin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: Help on upgrading from IRIX 3.2 to 3.3 on a PI
Message-ID: <1991May30.144817.29667@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>
Date: 30 May 91 14:48:17 GMT
Sender: shenkin@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Peter S. Shenkin)
Reply-To: shenkin@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu
Organization: Columbia University
Lines: 38


I'm about to upgrade from 3.2 to 3.3 on a 4d25tg.  Since I've never upgraded
an OS, I have a few questions that are not addressed in the "Release and
Installation Notes."  In addition to answering the specific questions that I am
about to ask, I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me about any "gotchas" you
came across while trying to do the same thing;  i.e., if you could also
answer the questions I wasn't smart enough to ask, I'd appreciate that, too.

Q1.  After receiving my machine in the first place, I went through a laborious
procedure to increase the swap space.  Will I have to do this again after
upgrading?  Is there anything I can do before I start to make this easier
or to render it unnecessary?

Q2.  The installation notes tell me to make full backups before installing the
new system software, but they do not say that I need to restore anything
after I do the installation.  Do I take this to mean that this should not
be necessary?  (If I shouldn't have to do a restore, then probably Q3 is 
irrelevant.)

Q3.  If it is necessary to restore part of the system, is there any way to 
make sure that I don't over-write files that 3.3 has created with the old
3.2 versions in the course of doing the restore? There doesn't seem to be a 
bru option to extract all files except where a file of the same name already
exists, and it seems to me that the restore would be very difficult
without some simple way of doing this.  For example, I have put tcsh into
/bin, but there are certainly going to be things in /bin that are updated
by the new OS;  therefore I can't just restore /bin.  Do I have to restore 
the individual files, such as tcsh, that I have added to directories, such as 
/bin, that touched by the upgrade? (I hope not, because I'm not sure I can 
remember what they all are!)  Also, how about files that pre-existed, but
that I had to change by hand, such as /etc/hosts and sendmail.cf?  Do I
have to have a list of what all these are?

	-P.
************************f*u*cn*rd*ths*u*cn*gt*a*gd*jb**************************
Peter S. Shenkin, Department of Chemistry, Barnard College, New York, NY  10027
(212)854-1418  shenkin@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu(Internet)  shenkin@cunixf(Bitnet)
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