On Wed, 7 Jun 2000, James Sutherland wrote:
> In general, yes, it will be difficult. Having said that, there are quite a
> few things I could upgrade quite easily: sound drivers, for example, or
> network drivers if I'm connected to the machine via another link (serial,
> another NIC, at the console).
[...]
>
> You don't need to; for an NIC, for example, you could just down it, rmmod,
> insmod the new one, and configure it. You are offline for perhaps 10
> seconds while the change takes place - which should be OK for most setups.
> (With a bit of clever trickery, you could even avoid dropping TCP sessions
> etc.)
Why "trickery"? You don't need to be connected via another link, you
don't need to have two NICs. Just telnet in, do:
# cd /lib/modules/<kversion>/net
# mv <nic>.o <nic>.old
# mv <nic>.new <nic>.o
# ifconfig eth0 down; rmmod <nic>; modprobe <nic>; ifconfig eth0 <params>; route add <ifneeded> (one line, of course)
and you're up again, no TCP connections get dropped, you keep using
the same shell on the same TCP connection. I use (even better):
# ifdown eth0; rmmod <nic>; ifup eth0
which takes care of modules, aliases and routes the right way...
Of course you must be sure that the new driver is ok. And you'd better have
some backup way to connect to the machine if it fails for some reasons.
But it's possible with no trickery at all.
Bringing down an interface breaks masqueraded connections, i think, or
so was at least with 2.0.
> It will take quite a while to get to this stage, and it won't be perfect,
> but it could be quite good...
>
>
> James.
.TM.
--
____/ ____/ /
/ / / Marco Colombo
___/ ___ / / Technical Manager
/ / / ESI s.r.l.
_____/ _____/ _/ Colombo@ESI.it
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