[support] Planning upgrade

[Metzler, David]

Yes take the site of line, primarily meaning to use the drupal admin
menu to put it into maintenance mode.  They didn't mean actually
shutting down apache or anything, but rather naviging to the Site
Configuration and taking the site of line. You should see a link that
looks like this on the administration menu. 

Site maintenance
    Take the site off-line for maintenance or bring it back online. 

As for the FTP client.  I tend to upgrade locally prior to upgrading
remotely on my MAC.  Sometimes the database export is a little askew,
but things generally work pretty much the same as on my hosting provider
which also only provides FTP access. 

I use Cyberduck on my Mac to ftp synchronization.  Don't know if it will
work better with your servers timestamp off, but it's worth a try. 

Steps I use for staging: 
1. Using phpMyAdmin backup download a local copy of the database. 
2. Import that database to mysql on my Mac. 
3. Copy all the files to my local box using ftp
4. Reconfigure settings.php to wrok locally. 
5. Check the site out so I know if there are database encoding issues
that aren't related to the upgrade.... Ignore these if nessecary. 
6. Do the upgrade locally and make sure everything works. 

When I'm ready to do Production.
1. Take the site offline using the drupal menu I described. 
2. Backup the mysql database again using phpMyAdmin
3. Use the Cpanel file administrator on my site to make a pre-upgrade
backup copy of my site. (this could probably be done via FTP as well.) 
4. Upload ALL of the locally unpacked upgrade files for drupal5.2 core
to production. 
5. Run the update.php script. 
6. Check the site out again. 
7. Put the site back online using the menu I described. 

It ain't perfect but it works pretty well in a remote hosted
environment. If something goes bad.  You have the copy to revert back
to, and you have the database backup to restore from. 

Dave
-----Original Message-----
From: support-bounces at drupal.org [mailto:support-bounces at drupal.org] On
Behalf Of A-NO-NE Music
Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2007 2:20 PM
To: Drupal Support
Subject: [support] Planning upgrade


I am planning to go from 5.1 to 5.2.  Do I really have to take the site
off-line?

I am having a major problem synching with local site.  The server time
stamp seems to be totally off.  Both Transmit and Dreamweaver8 tries to
download a bunch of files those which are known to be already synched,
while both of them are missing more important files such as modules.  Is
there any better option for OSX10.4?

I spent entire day to delete a few thousands duplicated images.  This
has been a nightmare.

I do have a stage directory on the server but synching with the live
directory seems to be almost impossible so I have abandoned it.  My ISP
only gives FTP access but not Terminal access.  Any suggestion on good
upgrade practice other than one is documented on Drupal.org, the one to
take site off-line, would be very much appreciated.

-- 

- Hiro

Hiroaki Honshuku, A-NO-NE Music, Boston, MA <http://a-no-ne.com>
<http://anonemusic.com>


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