[cisco-voip] How Many Docs Does it Take to Prep for an Upgrade?

[Ryan Huff]

I use an excel spread sheet with a hyperlink to the base doc in one sheet with notes and details gathered in the sheet.Then I create additional worksheets of subordinate documentation and notes and then make references from the base sheet to the subordinate sheets. I also have a sheet for customer discovery (current dns, ip, device loads .... etc). It ends up looking a lot like a Gantt chart.

If you'd like, I can sanitize and send one to you, to compare notes and see if there is anything of use to you.

Also, If time permits, and it's feasible,  I like to stage a mock upgrade in my lab with customer data (drs ... etc) and do a dry run.

-------- Original message --------
From: Anthony Holloway <avholloway+cisco-voip at gmail.com> 
Date:10/16/2015  2:38 PM  (GMT-05:00) 
To: Cisco VoIP Group <cisco-voip at puck.nether.net> 
Subject: [cisco-voip] How Many Docs Does it Take to Prep for an Upgrade? 

Does anyone else do this?  Gather all of the documentation ahead of time, because inevitably you're going to revisit a document more than once?  There are a lot of documents to gather!  Anything I could be doing better?  Tips?  Tricks?

I create a spreadsheet of all of the pertinent documents I need to review or reference, like in this screenshot.  There's over 90 documents in this list.  Granted, I don't read them all front to back, but some I do, and  for others I need to reference information within them nonetheless.  You never know when you might find a small font hidden note in there.

E.g., From the 8945 Release Notes

"Release 9.4(2)SR1 can only be upgraded from 9.3(4) and later. Releases prior to 9.3(4) have to be upgraded to 9.3(4) first."

Source: 8945 9.4(2)SR1 Release Notes

I actually missed this one recently, and unlike 7900 series phones, they phone will just brick itself and never register.  Causing you to walk to every phone and reset power to it, or walk the mac address tables of your layer 2 network and shut/no shut the ports.


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