Siebel customers (and employees alike) all over the world are busy enjoying Metalink3 which has recently replaced SupportWeb.

Everyone (well me, mainly) is taking great delight in taunting Oracle DBA types with incredulous cries of ‘Sorry - did you say you’re still on legacy Metalink2 ?’

A number of readers, impressed with this bleeding edge technology and dying for more, have emailed me asking why this humble Siebel blog hasn’t yet been updated to Drupal 6.0 RC2.

Consequently, I downloaded the distribution for Drupal 6 Release Candidate #2 and, unusually for me, I even took the time to read ‘UPGRADE.txt’. I followed the instructions therein and took the site offline so any visitors receive a configurable, professional looking message: ‘This site is being upgraded to bleeding edge CMS technology. Please spread the news and don’t forget to taunt any Oracle DBA’s.’

After that completely unnecessary configuration change (I have no visitors), I was then unable to login to initiate the upgrade. Sigh. Thankfully, I discovered this article from another early adopter which enabled me to regain control of my original site.

I attempted the upgrade from Drupal 5.3 which failed to modify the database schema and produced a worrying number of SQL errors.

Not to be defeated, I read this helpful article which implied the Drupal 5.x system should be running the latest stable release (5.6) which seemed eminently sensible advice.

I quickly upgraded from Drupal 5.3 to 5.6. Only I couldn’t because my site was now inaccessible after the partial, incomplete upgrade so I had to hold my breath while I restored from yesterday’s MySQL database backup which worked perfectly.

Then I upgraded Drupal from 5.3 to 5.6, having naively convinced myself this would fix the problem, and duly repeated the upgrade process to 6.0 RC2 which promptly failed with the same dire, database related, results.

Still, this is a beta release after all and sure enough (as always), some other poor soul has already been there and done that.

No fix yet. Roll on RC3.