Best practices for upgrading to Final Cut Server 1.5

When you upgrade your existing Final Cut Server to Final Cut Server 1.5, review and follow these best practices to ensure the upgrade proceeds successfully.

Overview

During the Final Cut Server 1.5 installation, the installer upgrades the version and schema of the Final Cut Server database backend.

The general steps the installer follows:

1. A user-accessible backup of the existing Final Cut Server database is created. This is saved to a location of the user's choice.

2. A temporary dump of the database that Final Cut Server subsequently uses to generate an updated database is created. This is stored on the current startup disk.

3. Installation of Final Cut Server files.

4. Installation of the upgraded Final Cut Server database.

Best practices

Follow these best practices to ensure the upgrade proceeds successfully.

• Final Cut Server administrators should ensure that the Final Cut Server startup disk has enough available disk space for the installer to install Final Cut Server files as well as temporarily store the database upgrade information during the upgrade process.

  • To check the actual size of the Final Cut Server database use the following Terminal command:

  • sudo du -sh /var/db/FinalCutServer/data

• If the installation of Final Cut Server is unsuccessful, you will need to uninstall and reinstall it from the Final Cut Server 1.5 installation disc. Also, you will need to restore the database from the user-accessible backup made during the Final Cut Server 1.5 install.

  • If the user-accessible backup creation is unsuccessful, do not uninstall Final Cut Server since there will be no backup to restore from during installation. Try creating a backup from the Final Cut Server preference pane on the existing Final Cut Server installation.

  • If the installer does not complete while processing the database migration, it's likely that there is not enough space to generate the database dump or the upgraded database. In this case, attempt the install again after creating additional space on the startup disk.

  • Note: You should only use the uninstalling and restoring from backup method if the installation is unsuccessful either during or after installation of the Final Cut Server files, but not before. Symptoms resulting from an improper installation could be subtle and include Final Cut Server not working as expected after installation completes, in which case examination of /var/log/install.log could give an idea of what happened.

• Important: Please be aware of the following exceptions

• If modifications were made to the postgresql.conf file prior to the upgrade, note that the original is moved aside during upgrade and subsequently maintained after the upgrade in /var/db/FinalCutServer/postgresql_8.2.conf .