SolidFire flash storage cluster for some time, and recently wanted to update the nodes to the current ElementOS 10.1 release.
Unfortunately, our FDVA management node installation was borked, so we decided to just roll a new one from the current VM appliance template - easy.
As it turns out though, the FDVA appliance only ships with the latest software release files, and the individual SolidFire nodes check back for a repository with their current version before starting the update, which consequently fails (it's all very Ubuntu-ish):
admin@SF-7323:~$ sudo sfinstall 192.168.10.21 -u admin -p password -l
2017-12-20 17:27:52: sfinstall Release Version: 10.1.0.83 Revision: Build date: 2017-11-23 01:27
2017-12-20 17:27:52: Checking connectivity to MVIP 192.168.10.21
2017-12-20 17:27:52: Successfully connected to cluster MVIP
2017-12-20 17:27:53: PrintRepositoryPackages failed: SolidFireApiError server=[192.168.10.10] method=[AptUpdate], params=[{'quiet': 2}] - error name=[xCheckFailure],
message=[cmdResult={ rc=255 stdout="W: Failed to fetch http://192.168.10.10/fluorine-updates/ubuntu/dists/precise/main/binary-amd64/Packages 404 Not Found
[..]
W: Failed to fetch http://192.168.10.10/fluorine-updates/security-ubuntu/dists/precise-security/universe/binary-amd64/Packages 404 Not Found
The SolidFire docs don't really mention what to do from there, so we tinkered around for some time and found this:
Any older version of the repository can be fetched using the update-fdva tool with the currently used ElementOS release version as command line (version number can be seen on the cluster web UI or when asking the cluster nodes for their mnode repository using sfinstall). In our case, the active version was 9.2.0.43 -
admin@SF-7323:~$ sudo update-fdva 9.2.0.43
Get: 1 http://localhost precise Release.gpg [490 B]
Get: 2 http://localhost precise-updates Release.gpg [490 B]
[..]
This will fetch the 9.2.0.43 version of the SolidFire repository, but will also downgrade to the matching (old) versions of solidfire-fdva-tools and solidfire-python-framework...
admin@SF-7323:~$ dpkg -l | grep fdva
ii solidfire-fdva-tools-fluorine-patch2-9.2.0.43 9.2.0.43 SolidFire FDVA Tools 9 [fluorine-patch2]
...so we immediately reinstalled the current versions, using update-fdva again, this time with the current release version number:
admin@SF-7323:~$ sudo update-fdva 10.1.0.83
With all that in place, we could just run the update routine using the usual sfinstall command.
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