[ovs-discuss] upgrading openvswitch

Gurucharan Shetty shettyg at nicira.com
Mon Jul 6 20:03:55 UTC 2015


On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 11:50 AM, Carlos Konstanski
<ckonstanski at pippiandcarlos.com> wrote:
> I am in the middle of an openvswitch upgrade from version 2.3.0 to 2.3.1. It
> is not going well. The issue: conf.db.
>
> The format of the JSON changed, so it is not possible to start 2.3.1 with a
> file generated under 2.3.0. The file must be regenerated.

What is the platform on which you have installed openvswitch? (i.e.
Ubuntu, Rhel etc)
Usually a simple '/etc/init.d/openvswitch* restart' should
automatically take care of the changes in database schema. If it did
not, it is an unfortunate bug.


>
> In order to regenerate it, I had to do the following:
>
> - stop openvswitch services
> - delete conf.db
> - generate a new conf.db (used emerge --config openvswitch in gentoo)
> - start openvswitch services
> - re-configure openvswitch from scratch because all the config in conf.db
> was lost
>
> I tried a modified version of these steps to attempt doing the procedure
> over an SSH connection. (I temporarily made eth0 the primary interface.) In
> the end it proved to be impossible. There comes a point when you have to
> turn on openvswitch with a blank config, and at point you have no network
> connectivity.
>
> I thought of copying the relevant portions of the old conf.db to paste into
> the new file. But that seemed like a bad idea because the format fo the JSON
> could have changed. Indeed some part of the file changed enough to render
> the old format unusable, which is why this entire procedure was necessary to
> begin with.
>
> Openvswith must be running in order to execute the commands needed to add
> interfaces to the config. Had it been possible to edit the config while
> openvswitch was down, I would have had a way out of this quandry.
>
> It seems that a highly advanced networking software package needs to be
> capable of being upgraded over a network connection. There should be an
> upgrade path for non-backward-compatible changes.
>
> Is there an alternative to running ovs-vsctl commands for writing the config
> that can be done while openvswitch is down?
>
> Thanks,
> Carlos Konstanski
> _______________________________________________
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> discuss at openvswitch.org
> http://openvswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss



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