Painless Release 2000

[Keven Riggle <K.Riggle@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Colleagues!
	In September 1999, III announced the availability of Release 2000 and
distributed the instructions for this self-install product.  I'm sure many
of you are approaching this upgrade with a bit of intrepidation.  I
certaintly did  - after all the instructions are 19 pages long and no one
at III will give you a good answer as to how long this process will take.

	I am posting this notice to tell you that the process really and truly is
relatively painless.  We are a "turnkey" site running our InnoPAC and
WebPac on a DEC Alpha server.  This server is housed at our campus
computing center two blocks away and their staff perform the normal daily
full backup duties.  Other than that they have nothing to do with the
server or the software.

	Last night the computing center staff ran the normal backup.  When I
arrived this morning I began the "preparation" phase that ran a space check
on our system, created a recovery tape, ftp'd the upgrade and pre-built
some of the functions.  Discounting the time it took to track someone down
at the computer center to load a fresh tape into the drive (they were
supposed to do that last night after the backup - argh!) this phase was
completed in 33 minutes.

	The "commit" phase which reboots the system into "maintenance mode",
installs and compiles the software, converts data, and then reboots the
system was completed in 55 minutes.  That's right, in under one and a-half
hours the entire process was completed (at least on our hardware).  I had
originally envisioned several hours for "data conversion".  That
"conversion" however took less than a minute, so I'm not sure what III was
referring to as "data".  At less than a minute it's obviously not much to
worry about.

	So, intrepidate no longer...just do it!

Keven


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Keven Riggle			Phone:  (414) 288-3253
Systems Librarian			Fax:      (414) 288-7813
Marquette University Libraries
1415 W. Wisconsin Avenue		E-mail: K.Riggle@xxxxxxxxxx
P.O. Box 3141
Milwaukee, WI  53201-3141
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