Migrating Ubersmith Appliances 3.x to 4.x

Read this document completely before starting the migration process, to ensure the necessary access is available to complete all steps. For these steps, the new appliance is the system the Ubersmith Appliance is being migrated to, and the old appliance is the system the Ubersmith Appliance is being migrated from. It is assumed that the Ubersmith host is upgraded first, and that the Ubersmith Appliance will be installed to the following default directory: /usr/local/ubersmith

If you would prefer to have Ubersmith perform your migration, please contact Ubersmith Support to discuss the scope of the project and to arrange for a quote from our Managed Services team.

Preparing for the Migration

Perform these steps before migration day.

Ensuring Connectivity

• Ensure that the old appliance can reach the new appliance via SSH.
• Ensure that the Ubersmith host can reach the new appliance. The new appliance will accept connections on 8080/tcp and 8443/tcp.
• Configure an SSH key between the two appliances to ease file copying and database dumps. See this online resource to perform this configuration task.

Deploying the New Ubersmith Appliance

• Ensure that the new appliance system is compatible with Ubersmith and install the Ubersmith Installation and Upgrade Utility prerequisites.
• Deploy the Ubersmith Appliance on the new appliance using the Ubersmith Installation and Upgrade Utility.
• Once the installation is complete, disable the app_cron container on the new appliance environment. This ensures that the new system does not start polling your devices before you are ready to use it.

cd /usr/local/ubersmith
docker-compose rm -sf app_cron

Scheduling Downtime/Dry Run

To get a time estimate of how long the Ubersmith Appliance will be offline, perform a dry run by performing the migration day steps, but not the post migration steps.

• Note the timing for the following events:

  • Database dump

  • Database transfer

  • Database restore

  • RRD transfer

  • Ubersmith Appliance upgrade

• Based on the details of the dry run, schedule downtime with your users. For extended downtime, consider performing the migration after hours or on a weekend. Appliances with large data sets will experience significant downtime during the RRD transfer phase.

Migration Day

These steps perform the migration and may cause the Ubersmith Appliance to be unavailable.

Exporting the Database

• By default, the Ubersmith Appliance database is named uberapp.

• Complete a logical export using mysqldump, which is likely already installed on the system. See the mysqldump documentation for MySQL 5.6. In most circumstances, the Ubersmith Appliance database is small, and will be at most a few hundred megabytes.

• Example usage of mysqldump:

mysqldump -u root -p uberapp > ubersmith_appliance_export.sql


• In this command the root user logs into MySQL, the password is prompted for and entered on the command line, the uberapp database is exported, and saved to a file named ubersmith_appliance_export.sql.

• Once the database export is complete, use the tail command to examine the end of the file to ensure it completed successfully.

tail -n1 ubersmith_appliance_export.sql

• A successful completion will show the output -- Dump completed on with a date and timestamp.

Copying the Database

• Copy the appliance database export file from the old appliance to the new appliance, using scp or sftp.

• Copy the appliance database export file into the new appliance’s app_db container, using the docker cp command:

docker cp ubersmith_appliance_export.sql ubersmith_app_db_1:/


• Enter a shell in the new appliance database container (app_db) to begin the restore:

cd /usr/local/ubersmith
docker-compose exec app_db bash


• Within the new appliance's shell in the database container, restore the database:

mysql -u root -p$MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD uberapp < /ubersmith_appliance_export.sql

Upgrading the Ubersmith Appliance

• On the new appliance, run the appliance_upgrade.sh script which is part of the Ubersmith Installation and Upgrade Utility.

Disabling Poll Tasks

• If simultaneous polling between two appliances is not desirable, stop the polling tasks on the old appliance. In a typical install, the cron tasks are owned by the ubersmith user. They can be deleted or commented out. To edit the ubersmith user's crontab, run this command as root:

crontab -e -u ubersmith

• Disabling these tasks ensures that the old appliance does not poll your infrastructure during the migration process. If this step is not performed now, be sure to perform it once the migration is complete.

Migrating RRD Files

• Copy (rsync, scp or sftp) the existing RRD files from the old appliance to the new appliance. The existing RRD files can be found on the old appliance in the directory:

/home/uberm/appliance/rrds

• On the new appliance, the RRD files are stored in a Docker volume named ubersmith_rrds. The simplest way to migrate the RRDs is to copy them directly into Docker's storage location for the volume:

/var/lib/docker/volumes/ubersmith_rrds/_data/

Post Migration

These steps finalize the migration and configure Ubersmith to use the new appliance.

Enabling Scheduled Tasks

• On the new appliance, recreate the cron container, so that the Ubersmith Appliance can perform scheduled polling tasks.

cd /usr/local/ubersmith
docker-compose up -d app_cron

• Permissions must be set on the RRD files within the Ubersmith Appliance cron container, so that the cron tasks can write to them. Execute the following command in /usr/local/ubersmith:

docker-compose exec app_cron chown -R ubersmith:ubersmith /var/www/appliance_root/rrds

Updating Ubersmith's Appliance Configuration

• When you are satisfied that the Ubersmith Appliance is functioning properly, renumber the new appliance with the IP address from the old appliance, or update Ubersmith's Appliance configuration (Settings → Appliances) to use the new address.

• Be sure to disable polling on the old appliance if it was not performed earlier in the migration process.