Upgrading U2PE

I just upgraded my older U2 Personal Edition environments to the latest release. Here’s some FYI for anyone else upgrading (Windows) Unidata 7.1 to 7.2 or Universe to 10.2.

  1. With regard to one of my main questions that I asked in the U2 forum about this, there is an installation option that asks if you want to do the install as an upgrade.
  2. Existing services are stopped before they are replaced. If you are running both UD and UV, make sure one is down before installing the other or there may be issues restarting services.
  3. The UD upgrade does not read the existing registry entries (telnet/ssh ports, login message, etc), so these still need to be re-tweaked after an upgrade, manually or with UniAdmin. For UV the existing options are preserved.
  4. The "Add Remove Programs" panel still shows UD 7.1 there after 7.2 is installed – since Universe isn’t versioned no extra entry displays.
  5. The updatevoc command needs to be run to update Unidata accounts. (Thanks to Bill Haskett for pointing me to the right verb.) It’s Update.Account in Universe.
  6. Installing UniAdmin from the UniData client package causes UniAdmin to stop working, showing an error that it’s unable to find the Uniadmin java class. (See point 8 but…) Installing UniAdmin from the UV 10.2A Client package on top of this allows it to work. This occurs when the original UniAdmin v1.3.x is not installed in the default directory (Default is a nasty "C:\IBM\…". I had it under Program Files, the old executable was not over-written but shortcuts were reset to go to "C:\" even though that’s not where the executable was. In any case this was a mess, but after completely uninstalling UniAdmin and reinstalling the admin v1.3.7 from the UD client package everything worked fine.
  7. Interestingly the UV client package includes an older UniAdmin v1.3.6, and the UniObjects DLL, for example, is 3.1.6.7251, while the Unidata client has UO v3.1.7.7276.
  8. Related to 6 and 7, if you attempt to load one client package over another, like UD over UV, the new versions will not replace the old one where they have files in common! Unlike the U2 DBMS’s, you must uninstall the older UniAdmin, UniDK, etc and reboot before installing a new one.
  9. Caveat emptor: IBM isn’t very good about avoiding DLL Hell (even with their .NET components), so if you have code that depends on an older DLL, copy it off somewhere before upgrading and ask your support provider about getting different DLLs to play nice on the same system.

I hope that’s of help to someone.

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