LON-CAPA Upgrade

Current Upgrade Procedure (Almost)

LON-CAPA system releases currently are not released under version numbers given the fast pace of system development. To upgrade your system, you need to

1. Make sure your software packages are up-to-date (based on install.lon-capa.org).
   • As root, run the script loncapaverifypackages. This script should be present on your system in the file /usr/sbin/loncapaverifypackages. If packages are out-of-date, this script will output the out-of-date packages. Packages that this script identifies as "should not be here", are packages that you may wish to remove to improve system security. (These packages may represent important modifications of your institution, so do with care. Removing packages is done with the command: rpm -e --nodeps PACKAGE_NAME.
2. Upgrade old software packages.
   • Upgrade software packages by either
     • Running /usr/sbin/loncapaupgradepackages.
     • Or, going to http://www.lon-capa.org/install/RPMS/, you can individual download each package from the world-wide web. You then need to enter the command: rpm -Uvh --force PACKAGE_RPM_FILE_NAME to upgrade your system.
3. Restore configuration files.
   • As you run /usr/sbin/loncapaupgradepackages or enter in rpm -Uvh --force commands, you may see messages appear on your screen such as:
     warning: /etc/httpd/conf/access.conf saved as /etc/httpd/conf/access.conf.rpmsave
     You can probably just type in commands like:
     cp /etc/httpd/conf/access.conf.rpmsave /etc/httpd/conf/access.conf
     to restore your configurations. However, it is worthwhile to use the 'diff' command to make sure that you are not accidentally losing important updates to the configuration files.
   • Alternatively, you can run /usr/sbin/loncaparestoreconfigurations to "smartly" run through the system and restore LON-CAPA configuration values.
4. Should you wish to automate all of this, you can (at your own risk) enable a script which will do all of this automatically. This definitely should NOT be implemented on a system that students are using). You can enable this script by entering the command: cp /usr/sbin/loncapaautoupgrade /etc/cron.daily/loncapaautoupgrade

Future Upgrade Procedure (not yet implemented)

In the future, LON-CAPA will be a versioned system that is released via CD. The upgrade procedure will be to insert the CD and follow instructions. The CD upgrade procedure is already defined and somewhat implemented, but awaits completion.