Is there risk in doing a Satellite DB restore on a separate host?

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I am testing the upgrade procedure for going from 5.5 to 5.6 (mostly just so I have seen the activity).

I have decided to restore a database backup from my production Satellite as part of the process.
1. Install RHEL 5.x and update to current (using a different IP and hostname)
2. Install Satellite 5.5 and update to current 5.5 release (schema and spacewalk packages)
3. Restore Database from our Production Satellite
4. validate no more updates apply
5. upgrade to Satellite 5.6

We do not use the PUSH capability (osad).

Does anyone know of any way that this would cause any issues? (i.e. client or server based)

Responses

Hello James,

What you described is essentially the upgrade scenario "Upgrading the Red Hat Satellite to version 5.6 and upgrading the underlying
operating system" except without the OS upgrade but with the addition of renaming the Satellite hostname. You can reference the steps as described in the Satellite upgrade documentation in rhn-upgrade package for Satellite 5.6 starting with /etc/sysconfig/rhn/satellite-upgrade/README (skipping the RHEL OS upgrade step if not needed, but using spacewalk-hostname-rename to update the Satellite with new IP/hostname).

The high-level plan you have sounds sane, I would test the new Satellite 5.5 server after importing the database, run spacewalk-hostname-rename (see man page for details), then test again everything's working as a Satellite 5.5 server, before upgrading to Satellite 5.6.

Hope this helps and feel free to contact Technical Support if any questions or issues,

Thanks Xixi.

I executed the original plan (with some minor tweaks) and everything went smoothly. I was able to see what the process entailed, some of the timing involved, etc... before I had to pull the trigger on my production Satellite.

Amazingly easy process that Red Hat published as well.

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