Saturday, September 22, 2018

First upgrade attempt after more than 15 months

Yesterday we had our first upgrade attempt of the ÖSHZ Eupen production site after more than 15 months without any update (their last update was 2017-05-30). I had been preparing this coup technically during more than 11 hours since Monday, most of the time in the evenings. I now also reviewed the docs in Installing a preview site to document this procedure.

The challenge with the ÖSHZ Eupen site is that they have so many users that it becomes difficult to decide for them whether they want an upgrade or not. They had a preview of the new version in a in testing site which has been running there for years, but they don’t use it very much. Normal Lino users want to do their work, they don’t like unproductive meta-work like testing and reporting problems.

So we had to figure out how to force them into the new version. We scheduled a server downtime on Friday from 12.30 to 14.00 followed by a testing phase from 14.00 to 15.00. Within that hour they detected 10 issues, of which we fixed 4 immediately. But the other issues need more time, so we decided to cancel the upgrade.

Everything worked like a charm, except for the psychological community work. Their community has accumulated some frustration and fears during the last 15 months where nothing was changing. We can now hope that the administrative problems are fixed and that confidence and trust in Lino can grow back among the end-users.