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Community ▶ Questions ▶ Clone linode before upgrade
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Clone linode before upgrade

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So, I want to do a live OS upgrade on my linode (OpenSuSE 13.2 => Leap 42.1). In the past, I've had very good success with OpenSuSE live upgrades, but I did the normal (recommended) set of steps to upgrade one of my home machines, and it failed. I could boot the machine, but it was not in a very usable state and I ended up rebuilding it instead of trying to fix the problems.

I want to update my Linode, but would like to back it up in advance just to be safe. I don't expect problems (the problems came with X, KDE, display drivers, etc. which don't apply to linode), but I want to have an easy backout plan.

So, what I want to do is:

  • shut the linode down

  • clone it (my.sys -> my.sys.clone)

  • start up the primary (my.sys) and go through the upgrade procedure on it

If everything is fine, I'll run it for a week or so, and if there are no problems, I'll delete the clone.

If there is a problem, I'll figure out what went wrong and then I'll delete my.sys and re-clone the clone (my.sys.clone -> my.sys) and try again. While I'm tracking down the problem, I may want to go back and forth between the two, so I'd shut down one and then boot the other. I won't boot both at the same time (so there won't be two linodes competing for the same fqdn/IP). Eventually, once everything is fine, I'll delete the clone.

Since I've never cloned my linode before (and actually haven't found a lot of documentation describing exactly how it works), I want to make sure that I'm not missing any steps.

Is this all reasonable?

Thanks

3 Replies

So I decided to just try it… and it didn't work. The clone booted to a new IP. So I really didn't clone the virtual machine… I just cloned a profile/disk which means that I can't trivially switch between the two of them. At the very least, I'll have to play with DNS. every time I change which one I want to boot. It may work, but it's not the trivial solution I was hoping for.

Linode backups won't do any better I suspect. They only backup disk, and a restore apparently alters your virtual machine somehow (it says that any disk partition will be restored to an ext3 partition, even if it was ext4 or something else originally). As a result, I'm not really excited to even experiment with them.

This is a bit disappointing…. a true clone of a VM should be possible in my opinion.

I'm leaning towards just proceeding with OS updates and hoping for the best. I've got the entire build automated with puppet, so if the host is completely destroyed, I can rebuild it, but that's slower and involves more effort than just switching back to a backup clone.

I believe if you have networking set up for static, the clone will get the same IP address. If you have it set up for DHCP, which I believe used to be default, it will obviously get a different ip address.

I could well and easily be wrong though :)

I'm already using static IP on the host (and of course adding all the appropriate info to the DNS Manager), so this doesn't seem to be the problem.

Thanks for the suggestion.

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