How to update Asterisk and how to backup before updating

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

Hi all,

Could someone explain to me, in dummy language, how I go about updating my current verison of asterisk (11.8.1) to the latest LTS version in the branch (11.10.2 at the time of writing)?

I have a running system that I should not go down longer then a few hours for scheduled maintenance. So, if the update somehow kills my system I need to be able to return to the current situation. How would I best go about backing up (and restoring if needed) of the system?

I’m running CentOS 6.5 with Asterisk 11.8.1 and a bunch of PRI’s installed…

Thank you so much!

2

I would make a virtual machine to install all the system from scratch, and install everything from there, to make tests.
Personnally my asterisk servers are plain asterisk, quite straightforward and I only use “simple” functions of the server. So in my case, I only need a fresh install of asterisk, the the whole content of the /etc/asterisk directory.
Hope that helps.

3

The only thing that might need backing up is astdb. I think the implementation of this changed fairly radically in recent versions.

In practice, though, there should be in incompatibilities between the two versions you mention, unless you are relying on a bug that has since been fixed.

4

If you are using self-compiled Asterisk version the process is quite simple:

  • first do a backup of the config and AstDB
  • stop Asterisk
  • do a backup of the modules (bin/lib/asterisk/modules/)
  • delete the modules (rm -Rf modules/)
  • compile the new version of Asterisk
  • start Asterisk

This procedure works for me.