Upgrading NEOSYS

Upgrading NEOSYS fully

Backing up prior to upgrading

THIS IS MANDATORY!

For small installations, take a copy of the whole of the D:\NEOSYS folder (or where-ever NEOSYS is installed) into another folder. Preferably place the copy on another disk or partition so that it is not included in any whole disk backup that might be running in parallel to NEOSYS backup. You can omit D:\NEOSYS\IMAGES and D:\NEOSYS\LOGS folder from the copy to save time.

For large installations you can avoid the above, which can take so much time as to be virtually impossible, by doing the upgrade EARLY IN THE MORNING since all the data will have been backed up the previous night. If you rely on the nightly backup (which only backups data and not programs) then you MUST take copies of the following folders which contain the current version of the programs that are going to be upgraded.

D:\NEOSYS\NEOSYS
D:\NEOSYS\NEOSYS.NET
D:\NEOSYS\NEOSYS.MAC or D:\NEOSYS\NEOSYS.W3C

Downloading

Get the latest version of NEOSYS

Download http://www.neosys.com/support/neosys2.exe in NEOSYS\downloads folder and rename it to neosys2-(DATE).exe (eg neosys2-10th November 2009.exe) - this is to keep track of the various downloads we do for the client and also allows to install a previous version if needed.

Next run it.

Downloading previous versions of NEOSYS

The 8 previous versions of neosys are stored at:

http://www.neosys.com/support/neosys22.exe

http://www.neosys.com/support/neosys23.exe

http://www.neosys.com/support/neosys24.exe

http://www.neosys.com/support/neosys25.exe

http://www.neosys.com/support/neosys26.exe

http://www.neosys.com/support/neosys27.exe

http://www.neosys.com/support/neosys28.exe

http://www.neosys.com/support/neosys29.exe

Installing

Closing NEOSYS processes should happen automatically during upgrade but you can also do it manually as follows:

Closing NEOSYS services

The installation procedure first creates a GLOBAL.END file in the NEOSYS programs folder causing all serving processes to terminate. Maintenance processes must be terminated manually.

Next, the installation procedure attempts to update the WAITING.EXE file and, if the processes haven’t terminated quickly enough, this will fail asking for retry or abort. Retry immediately or once all the processes have terminated.

The last step of the installation procedure is to delete the GLOBAL.END file to allow processes to start normally.

Troubleshooting

If you choose to abort the installation for any reason then the GLOBAL.END file will have to be deleted manually since its presence prevents any processes from starting up.

Post installation steps

New versions of the software sometimes perform quick or long database conversions.

Starting NEOSYS in maintenance mode immediately after upgrading leaves you more in control if anything goes wrong.

It not necessary to use the maintenance mode to start-up once after upgrading and before starting an automatic neosys process.