Perform a software update

In practice, performing an update is no more complicated than pressing a button in the web administration, and waiting. However, in order to be prepared for the unexpected, following the guidelines below is recommended.

• Read the release notes
• Dedicate a possible maintenance window of at least an hour, even though the process typically takes 5 minutes
• Be prepared to access the console in case of failure
• Make an external backup (export; copy-paste for example) of your configuration before updating
• If you are using a virtualised system, you can block all in/outbound email traffic to the node, and take a snapshot of the machine (and merge the snapshot after verifying that it works)
• If you have a cluster, you can update one node at a time. Try to avoid any changes to the configuration until all clustered nodes are running on the same version

Online update

To perform an online update, go to the Operations -> Software update page, select the hosts that you would like to update, and press the Install button to start the update.

Offline update

To perform an offline update, begin with downloading the latest software image. You can find the URL at http://dl.halon.se/sp/version/?version=latest. Then enable root login, and login using, for example, SSH. Upload the latest image to the storage partition of Halon using, for example, FTP or SCP:

# cd /storage/
# ftp http://192.168.0.1/halon-sp-image-x.x-amd64

Then run the following command to initiate the update process, followed by a reboot to apply the update:

# updated --install halon-sp-image-x.x-amd64
Update instructions ready for next reboot
# reboot