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Reporting / Monitoring Booster Upgrade Process

What

The auto-upgrade Booster feature will offer FileWave administrators a centralized way to upgrade all their boosters from within FileWave.

When/Why

Having to ssh or remote control to each of them to download and run the installer takes too much time. Starting with FileWave 14.4, the "Boosters" and "Booster Details" tabs will provide an action for each Booster that has an applicable upgrade available. Some of the criteria to determine if there is an applicable upgrade are:

  • Booster has to be at least 14.4
  • The operating system version has to be supported by the target version
  • The booster has to be running in order to trigger an upgrade
  • The version number of the target version has to be higher than the currently installed version (i.e you cannot use this feature to reinstall/downgrade to a specific version)

This will discuss the reporting functions around this auto-upgrade process.

How

In the "Booster Details" tab, there are three new fields that indicate the status of the booster upgrade:

Booster Status Fields 2.png

Upgrade Status - This field shows the current progress of the booster with one of the below statuses:

  • No upgrade in progress: Currently, no upgrade is being installed. This status is also shown when the last upgrade was successful.
  • Downloading: Indicates that the booster is currently downloading a new booster upgrade from the server; a necessary step before the upgrade can be installed.
  • Installing: The booster is currently installing an update. This should either lead to the "No upgrade in progress" or "Failed" state. The default timeout is one hour.
  • Failed: Indicating the upgrade was unable to complete.

Available Upgrade Version - Reports which upgrade version is available to this particular booster, given its operating system.

Scheduled for Upgrade - This flag indicates whether the booster is in the current upgrade queue.

  • 'true': Booster is either processing an upgrade or waiting for a preceding Booster to finalize an upgrade, including failures.
  • 'false': No upgrade is scheduled

Only on each upgrade success, will subsequent Boosters continue to automatically upgrade, if scheduled, to the version indicated by the 'Available Upgrade Version'.  Booster upgrade failures prevent further automated, scheduled upgrades until addressed or overridden by bypassing the failed Booster from the 'Unschedule Booster' context menu item.

Digging Deeper

When an upgrade is triggered through FileWave Central, the server sends a notification to the Booster with a URL parameter pointing to the upgrade package (rpm for Linux, pkg for Mac, MSI for Windows) that shall be downloaded and installed. Currently, this URL will point to the FileWave CDN (https://fwdl.filewave.com/) for official releases. Both "Boosters" and "Booster Details" view offer a filter to only show Boosters that can be upgraded.

The location for auto upgrade logs is;

  •  Linux and MacOS: /var/log/fwbooster_upgrade.log 
  • Windows: C:\ProgramData\FileWave\FWBooster\Data Folder\upgradeBooster.log