How to upgrade JBoss Web in JBoss 5.x.x ?

Question

JBoss Web 2.1.3 in JBoss 5.1.0 has some fixes that I need on a production server running JBoss Web 2.1.2 in JBoss 5.0.1.

I don't want to upgrade to JBoss 5.1.0 yet on a production cluster. This is too risky.

So how do I upgrade JBoss Web only?

This is a sar. So I'd imagine all that is required is to switch in jbossweb.sar from JBoss 5.0.1.

Has anybody done this? Is this the correct approach? Are there any gotchas?

I can't find any useful documentation in relation to this on the web.

Maybe I should ask this question on serverfault - but there seems to be less activity there.

Answer 1

Swapping out jbossweb.sar might work, but it's pretty risky in itself. If you're averse to the risk in moving to 5.1, I'd be just as averse to the risk of swapping JBossWeb.

That said, if you have a good automated test suite, then you might be able to get enough confidence in the swap to take it to production.

This sort of situation is where I get a lot of value from the RedHat/JBoss EAP subscription - they will backport fixes to the version of JBoss that you're running, plus test and verify it for you.

Answer 2

I managed to reproduce the bug we had and verified that it did not occur with jboss 5.1.0. I upgraded to jboss 5.1.0 to sort this out. That plus lots of system testing and everyone was happy.