[goetz]

Upgrading MacOS Server is a very hazardous undertaking.

In general, I think that upgrading (as opposed to a “clean” install) from MacOS 10.4 to 10.5 is a serious problem. For commercial MacOS client boxes, doing the “archive and install” is pretty clearly the way to go.

Doing the default upgrade leaves MacOS with a lot of bad stuff.

It has been explained elsewhere that upgraded MacOS systems (both server and client variants of the OS) leave one with stale/old man pages. This problem can be corrected simply by deleting the old pages which allows the new (10.5) pages to be used.

There are more serious issues.

After I upgraded a number of Intel Xserves (upgrading from 10.4.10 to 10.5.0), I found that their lights off management feature (LOM) seemed broken in several ways. I noticed that the Server Monitor app was also broken. Investigation (both on my own and with Apple’s tech support) revealed that the problem stemmed from an old kernel extension (kext). The problem could be corrected by doing a clean 10.5 server install (and then a full system reconfiguration). For MacOS Server, there is NO “archive and install” option. The LOM problem could also be corrected by moving the correct/new kext package (AppleBMC.kext) from a clean install to the troublesome upgraded box(es).

But here is something I think is deeply disturbing.
My upgraded boxes don’t just have that one old kext.
They have have many many old kext’s!

If you go to the extensions folder on upgraded and freshly installed MacOS Server systems, there are tons of differences. On my upgraded system, all (at least many many) of the kernel extensions are old whereas the same extensions have 2007 dates in the fresh installation. Since kernel extensions are essential low-level pieces of the OS, one has to imagine that they’re important and that using old versions is bad and maybe dangerous.

For example, the extension autofs.kext exists in both trees. On the upgraded tree, its date is 10/29/06, its size is 166,989B and its version is 1.0.0d1. On the fresh install, its date is 10/9/07, its size is 166,525B and its version is 2.0.0.

As another example, there is an extension named AppleI2S.kext. On the upgraded tree, its date is 10/29/06 and its version is 1.0.0. On the fresh install, its date is 10/9/07 with a version of 1.0.1.

These are just two of many examples.

In many cases, the kexts seem to be the same (e.g. they have the same size and version numbers) even when the dates are different. In many many cases though, the files are different.

As a solution to my LOM issue, Apple’s advice was to do a clean install (as opposed to the upgrade I had already done). Of course this is something of an undertaking on a large set of Xserves.

As more general advice though, doing a clean install of 10.5 (Server) seems like the only way to go!

This seems more than a little worrisome and suggests very serious issues with Leopard upgrades!

My $.02,

K

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