Just a few notes that might be of use to other people who are upgrading DSS to version 3518.

(Btw, many thanks to open-e tech support who answered all my panic-filled questions patiently and accurately!)

- We were on version 3007. You cannot upgrade to the current latest version (3518) without first upgrading to an in-between version (such as 3278)

- The upgrade from 3007 to 3278 can be done over the internet. However, our DSS server is not on the www, so we had to use a CD. Note. you CANNOT use a USB stick for this upgrade.

- Open E recommends that Version 3518 be booted from a USB stick (as of now there is no other way to upgrade - not internet, not CD) in trial mode so you can test the installation before doing a full upgrade because a downgrade is not possible.

- When we booted from a USB stick into 32 or 64 bit trial mode, the boot/console worked fine, but the web GUI would not load (even though pings in both directions were fine). Called open-e and they suggested checking the md5 checksum of the download. I hadn't done that the first time (and had deleted the iso already), so it might have been wrong - but when I did download the iso the second time, the checksum checked out, and everything worked great after that (so a corrupt iso was most likely the problem the first time around)/

- Once we were in v 3518 trial mode, the 3ware raid card web gui stopped working - it would let us log in, but any attempt to change to a different option gave the error message "You have been logged out due to inactivity or Cookies are Disabled" which is a problem already resolved at http://www.kb.open-e.com/entry/135/ (the update has Europe/Berlin as the default time zone, which is one hour ahead of us, so there was a 1 hr time difference and the 3ware raid controller GUI was timing out as a result). Fixed the time and everything worked fine after that.

Hope this is of use to someone.