Upgrading Platinum systems with unreliable Internet connections
If your EAMs, NAMs or Affinity units have a slow or intermittant Internet connection, there is a possibility of problems ocurring during a firmware upgrade. The system can enter a fault state when an upgrade takes a significantly long time or is interrupted. To guard against this, it is possible to download a mirror copy of the firmware onto the filesystem of the EAM, NAM or Affinity itself. It can then upgrade itself using this copy as the upgrade source. The process is essentially identical to using a local mirror site with the exception that it uses the device itself as its own mirror server.
The system should have access to the Internet during the download step but it does not needĀ Internet access while it is actually upgrading. If the download process is interrupted, it can be easily restarted and it will continue from the point at which it failed. The operation of the device is not affected during the download (other than by creating a bandwidth requirement) so this process can be repeated safely and incrementally until it is complete.
Platinum systems use the rsync protocol to update their firmware to the latest revision. rsync is an extraordinarily flexible tool but can be rather complex. The upgrade script on the EAM is a front-end to rsync which is used to hide this complexity and ensure the safe use of the protocol.
Setting up a Platinum system as its own upgrade mirror involves four steps:
- Downloading the mirror content;
- Setting up the system as a local rsync server;
- Configuring the system to use itself as an upgrade server; and
- Performing the upgrade.
The procedure is slightly different for systems with different architectures so the instructions have been split into three. Please select one of the links below: