[Powerschool] PowerSchool upgrade to 5.2

Fri Aug 1 11:43:33 CDT 2008

Jane thanks for the info about the printing and the updates path.  I checked
ours as well and sure enough ours were unchecked too.  Thanks again for the
heads up. 

And when I was having my problems with the upgrade the Support techs were
very helpful.  I couldn't have gotten through the issues without their help.
Kudos to them.  :-)

Thanks,

Curt Qualset

Technology Coordinator, CompTIA A+ Certified

Elkhorn Valley Schools

PO Box 430

Tilden, NE 68781

402-368-5301

  _____  

From: Jane Davis [mailto:jdavis at mail.hhs.esu16.org] 
Sent: Friday, August 01, 2008 11:25 AM
To: 'Curt Qualset'; 'Dave Evertson'; powerschool at lists.esu10.org
Subject: RE: [Powerschool] PowerSchool upgrade to 5.2

I upgraded a week ago today.. I was not at 5.1.x so I had to upgrade to that
first.  I installed Oracle on my data drive.  The upgrade went OK.  I did
call tech support about a JAVA questions and they were helpful.

I found the Sybase to Oracle Migration Guide to be the only reference
material that I needed to follow.

The only glitches that I have encountered have been with permissions to
print from the students function menu.  For some reason in the group
security section -  every group had the print report permission unchecked.
So I had to check it so that we could print reports.     Also, in the
district office, I could only choose one year in the terms pull down menu.
I called tech support and they just had me recreate the years and terms in
the district office.  It is only needed to print reports or do EOY.

I did EOY Wednesday and so far everything looks fine.

If you want to do a manual backup -download the Oracle database backup and
restore guide - On page 3 of that guide the SID it references is PSPRODDB

It backs up to the drive:\oradata\flash_recovery_area\PSPRODDB\BackupSet
directory

Remember that you want to upgrade so that you can get state reporting
updates.

Also remember to fill in the new update path to srupdates.powerschool.com

In the automatic update found at  Start Page
<http://172.16.1.249/admin/home.html>  > System Administrator
<http://172.16.1.249/admin/tech/home.html>  > System Settings
<http://172.16.1.249/admin/systemsettings/home.html>  > Automatic Updating

Jane

From: powerschool-bounces at lists.esu10.org
[mailto:powerschool-bounces at lists.esu10.org] On Behalf Of Curt Qualset
Sent: Friday, August 01, 2008 10:23 AM
To: 'Dave Evertson'; powerschool at lists.esu10.org
Subject: RE: [Powerschool] PowerSchool upgrade to 5.2

I ran into the same thing as you, Dave.  Thought it was just our setup but I
guess not.  I had to exclude those same folders and files as well.  So far
this week the nightly backups look like they are working without any
problems. But I was seeing my hang ups on the weekend at the same time the
backup started on Friday night (the one log file that showed the errors got
as big as 24 GB good thing I had plenty of room on the Hard drive); so we
will see what happens when I come in on Monday next week, whether I have to
re-boot the server and call PS support for a fix again or it works like it
should.   

Let's cross our fingers.

I was kind of leery about this upgrade with Oracle b/c of at my previous
work; they upgraded their data base to use Oracle in the fall (around
October) and by the time I left there in August of the next year they were
still trying to work out the bugs.  So when I read that PS had some schools
for test sites (ginnie pigs) I figured they would have worked out pretty
much most of the issues, I know you can't get them all and everyone's setup
is different.  But things like this they need to explain better which is
like pulling teeth sometimes to get info out of PS. 

Thanks,

Curt Qualset

Technology Coordinator, CompTIA A+ Certified

Elkhorn Valley Schools

PO Box 430

Tilden, NE 68781

402-368-5301

  _____  

From: powerschool-bounces at lists.esu10.org
[mailto:powerschool-bounces at lists.esu10.org] On Behalf Of Dave Evertson
Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2008 2:33 PM
To: powerschool at lists.esu10.org
Subject: [Powerschool] PowerSchool upgrade to 5.2

Just a note on the saga of the PowerSchool upgrade to Premier 5.2.

I ran EOY before the upgrade, went through the upgrade and did the WRONG
thing on the Oracle install, placing it on two drives instead of one.
Windows server users, make sure you install Oracle on a single drive, and
make that drive your data drive.  I had to restore to Sybase from backup and
run through the upgrade process again to get this fixed.

After the successful upgrade, things went well for a few days and then the
server would hang at night, stuck in a comm process loop.  The log window
would just be scrolling with unreadable errors.  After shutting down and
rebooting, sometimes the app would run and sometimes it would encounter an
error connecting to the database.  When I could not get the app to run, I
would restore to the previous good backup and it would work, but that would
not be practical when lots of data was being changed when school is in
session.

The first fix PS had us do was upgrade from JDK 1.4 to 1.5.  If you haven't
done that yet, it's not made immediately obvious that you need to or how to
do it.  You have to go to the Java web site archives and find the old 1.5 to
download and install, it is not available on the support site, and is not
available on the common java site for downloads because the latest version
is 1.6 (which you don't want).

That fix did not solve our problem of nightly hangs, so we were elevated to
an engineer who found the problem was a small, corrupt data file.  He
restored this and informed me that our antivirus (sophos) or backup software
(backupexec) was probably causing this as the open file was read during a
scan or while backing up.  My guess is it was more the backup software,
because it runs and incremental backup nightly about the time the problem
would occur.  This was never a problem with the Sybase database.

So, here are the recommendations PS support gave me.  Exclude the
drive:/oracle and drive:/oradata directories from active and on-access virus
scans.  Also exclude these from backup, except for the
drive:/oradata/flash_recovery_area.  The flash_recovery_area holds the
backup files of the PS data and can be restored if Oracle would ever need to
be reinstalled, so those are the data files you want to back up.  

I was informed that the PowerSchool data folder is no longer used with
Oracle, all the data is in the PowerschoolPremier and Oradata directories.
Since Sybase used the PowerSchooldata directory for data and backups, it is
quite large and can be removed/archived once the switch is made to oracle.
This would free up lots of space on your server, ours is over 60 GB.  There
is no longer any need to remove the translog files periodically.

Hope that helps some of you avoid the problems we have had.

Dave Evertson

Cozad City Schools

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