Upgrade paths to ns7

Upgrade ns6 to ns7: backup/restore

Let’s start with it: restore a backup set of ns6 on ns7.

Luckily, there are more similarites than differences. Most of the modules are 1-1 upgrade. I’d like to discuss about how to cope with differences!

The File server/Shared folders module received the biggest changes, and present the following issues:

  1. Authenticated access to shared folders. If the account provider is LDAP, authentication cannot work: Active Directory is required.

  2. Web access to shared folders. In ns7, web access is provided by a new package, nethserver-virtualhosts. Shared folders are accessible only as Samba shares (also SFTP and NFS soon - yes, this is another story).

This morning, I was discussing those points with @filippo_carletti and @giacomo.

About 1, a possible strategy could be:

  • retain nethserver-directory as ns6 (LDAP provider) after restore

  • If needed, perform an additional, separate, step: upgrade to nethserver-dc

The upgrade is technically possible because the ns6 LDAP backup contains the Samba SAM DB data.


About 2, there could be different solutions, depending on how a particular shared folder is used. Possible scenarios that come to mind:

  1. The shared folder was the virtual host web root: http://vhost.tld

  2. The shared folder was a path in a particular virtual host http://vhost.tld/ibayaliasname

  3. The shared folder was available from ANY virtual host (global): http://192.168.1.1/ibayaliasname, http://vhost.tld/ibayaliasname

  4. HTTP Basic Authentication was required

  5. Custom filesystem permissions are set

  6. (…did I miss something?)

It’s hard to catch them all. Let’s see some possible approaches:

I feel the “Upgrade to virtual host” action would cover a lot of upgrade requirements. It’s missing scenario 3. Because of it, a generated .conf file is still necessary.

Are we missing some other cases? What do you think? /cc @dev_team @quality_team @Lewis @Mario_Lanno @telekomiker (@alefattorini, please help me on notifying other people interested on this!)

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