[ovs-discuss] upgrading openvswitch

[Gurucharan Shetty]

Looks like Gentoo has screwed it up for you without providing a proper
way to upgrade OVS.

On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 1:18 PM, Carlos Konstanski
<ckonstanski at pippiandcarlos.com> wrote:
> 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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> discuss mailing list
>>> discuss at openvswitch.org
>>> http://openvswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss