Upgrading our Second Dev server (“Dev 2”)

Originally posted on Mar 3, 2017

Having successfully upgraded our first dev server and updated our documentation, we were ready to upgrade our second dev server.

Once again we enlisted the help of Andrew Hulme  and Cherif Abbes​ from Blackboard, who were on the end of a Skype chat and ready to give advice if we hit any issues.

More about passwords

Our second dev server turned out to have a slightly different configuration than the first one.  Our first attempt to upgrade failed and we found out the following, thanks to Cherif:

1) The same password should be used for several stanzas in the bb-config.properties file:

bbconfig.database.server.systemuserpassword=

bbconfig.database.admin.password=

antargs.default.vi.db.password=

antargs.default.vi.stats.db.password=

antargs.default.vi.report.user.password=

bbconfig.cs.db.cms-user.pass=

bbconfig.cs.db.systemuser.pass=

2) That same password should also be used for the following database accounts:

“sys”

“system”

bblearn1

bblearn1_admin

bblearn1_cms

bblearn1_stats

bblearn1_cms_doc

Or in “old money”:

“sys”

“system”

bb_bb60

bb_bb60_admin

bb_bb60_cms

bb_bb60_stats

bb_bb60_cms_doc

3) That same password has to be forced into the database for two accounts:

UPDATE bb_bb60_cms.xy_file_systems

SET DB_PASSWORD = 'password'

WHERE NAME = 1;

COMMIT;

UPDATE bb_bb60_admin.bb_instance

SET DB_PASS = 'password', STAT_DB_PASS = 'password'

WHERE PK1 = 1;

COMMIT;

Once those passwords are set, run pushconfigupdates to ensure they are all set in the application.  Then we’re in a good position to upgrade.

Settings that Java 8 makes redundant

Following a ticket to Blackboard support we confirmed that

bbconfig.max.permsize.tomcat=

is no longer required with Java 1.8.

So we have removed that line from our bb-config.properties file.

Recurrence of Java log spam issue

I wrote an entry previously about log spam appearing in a tomcat log file.​

We found that this issue re-occurred after our Dev 2 upgrade, even though we had applied the fix we identified as part of our Dev 1 upgrade.

We resolved this by following the tip posted to the BBADMIN-L mailing list by Rosalind Benoit  which was to add the attribute

-Djava.util.prefs.systemRoot=/home/bbuser/.java/

To

bbconfig.jvm.options.extra.tomcat=

In the bb-config.properties file.  With this we could remove our previous fix.

More fixes

We raised a ticket with Blackboard to see if there was a fix for the colour picker issue when setting the course menu colours described here: https://blackboard.secure.force.com/btbb_articleview?Id=kA339000000CefICAS  There was indeed a fix.  I won’t post it here, but you can get it from Blackboard.

Making plans

Once we have successfully upgraded our preproduction service I’ll share our full implementation plan so far.

Next week we do our preprod upgrade!