[rt-users] Migration strategy for RT 2.x --> 3.4.5 upgrade

[Scott Courtney]

Greetings, all

First, I want to take a moment to thank Jesse Vincent and this list for RT
itself and the support I've received here. Last weekend I managed a full cutover
of a nonprofit organization's corporate email infrastructure. Over 60 RT
tickets figured prominently in the planning process and in trouble resolution
during and after the cutover. I can't imagine how we could have coordinated and
executed this cutover so smoothly without RT, because so many things would have
slipped through the cracks. THANKS!

Next, my for-profit employer also uses RT, and we're preparing to move from
version 2.x on Postgres to version 3.4.5 on MySQL within the next month or
so. Nothing against Postgres, but we have lots of expertise in-house on MySQL
and all our other systems use that, so we want to consolidate. I will
probably take the approach of using native SQL DUMP facilities to move the
data to MySQL at the RT 2.x level and then run the migration against
MySQL -- again, the idea being that I'm more familiar with troubleshooting
in that environment, so the faster I can move into my database-of-expertise
the more likely I am to be able to quickly resolve problems found during
the RT upgrade itself.

We have the luxury of deploying a new server host at the same time, so we
will be able to bring up RT 3.4.5 fully in parallel before we cut over. My
plan is to get the migration "down to a science" using a test snapshot of
the RT 2.x database, and literally script the process end-to-end so that on
cutover day I have a canned script that will just work because I've tested it
repeatedly in our exact environment. I've got lots of up-front time to do the
pretesting, but RT is mission-critical to our company and therefore I need to
get it right the first time when we decide to go live.

I'm confident of my ability to install and configure 3.4.5 itself, now that I
have experience with 3.4.4 in the nonprofit environment. But I've not tried
an upgrade of 2.x to 3.4.x before, and the person who was our company RT admin
before me indicated (without being very specific) that the migration scripts
were broken with regard to binary attachments.

It's been at least a year since my predecessor tried to do an RT upgrade, so
I am wondering if the problems he encountered still exist, or if it is now
a reasonable certainty that an upgrade will "just work" if done according to
the RT instructions.

Has anyone done this recently, and would care to post a quick "snapshot"
of where we are with regard to migrating an RT database that has attachments
embedded? I'm not looking for detailed, step-by-step instructions -- I can
get that by the old-fashioned RTFM method. :-) What I'm seeking is simply
a commentary of, "Yes, it basically works as advertised," or "Well, most of
the upgrade works but attachments are still broken," or "I have no idea
what you're talking about, attachments have always worked fine."

Thanks for suggestions/advice/comments.

Scott

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Scott Courtney         | "I don't mind Microsoft making money. I mind them
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