8.3 Alpha Upgrade Tips

Upgrading from Alpha 7.3 to 8.3 using the new hobbyist kit (THANKS!)
any special hints/tips?

Have a virgin DS10L from Island running 7.3-perhaps-not-sure. Was
thinking of dusting it off, doing the upgrade or a fresh install
(again not sure which to do) on it, then migrating the live 7.3 to
the 8.3, upgrading the old live 7.3 once the new 8.3 can replace it.

What do you think? two 7.3 to 8.3 upgrades, or one 8.3 fresh install
and one upgrade?

Ending-up with two working 8.3s, if it makes sense to cluster them
ostensibly to get hardware redundancy, anything one should do along
the way knowing that the final 8.3 configs may be clustered?

Mike wrote:[color=blue]
> Upgrading from Alpha 7.3 to 8.3 using the new hobbyist kit (THANKS!)
> any special hints/tips?
>
> Have a virgin DS10L from Island running 7.3-perhaps-not-sure. Was
> thinking of dusting it off, doing the upgrade or a fresh install
> (again not sure which to do) on it, then migrating the live 7.3 to
> the 8.3, upgrading the old live 7.3 once the new 8.3 can replace it.
>
> What do you think? two 7.3 to 8.3 upgrades, or one 8.3 fresh install
> and one upgrade?
>
> Ending-up with two working 8.3s, if it makes sense to cluster them
> ostensibly to get hardware redundancy, anything one should do along
> the way knowing that the final 8.3 configs may be clustered?[/color]

Without knowing any more detail about your environment, I would take the
"virgin" DS10L and do a fresh V8.3 install on it.

Your post implies that there is another Alpha system with some version
of V7.3-N. If N=2, I *think* you can cluster the two systems without
difficulty, and then upgrade to V8.3 at your leisure (or alternatively,
create another system root on the DS10L system disk, and boot the other
machine into that root, bypassing the need for an upgrade).

My suppositions assume that you might have "other" disks on the systems,
and have segregated your applications and their associated data from the
system disks. If the system disks are the only disks, your task becomes
more complicated, but still possible. Different approaches might be
needed, depending on your scheme.