[ovs-discuss] upgrading openvswitch

[Carlos Konstanski]

Gentoo. Looking at the ebuild script, I see that it downloads the source 
from:

http://openvswitch.org/releases/openvswitch-2.3.1.tar.gz

I actually have two service scripts:

/etc/init.d/ovsdb-server
/etc/init.d/ovs-vswitchd

ovs-vswitchd depends on ovsdb-server.

The moment I tried to restart these services after the upgrade, it 
complained that conf.db was incompatible. That's when it all started.

Carlos

On 06.07.15 14:03, Gurucharan Shetty wrote:
> 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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