Cisco has run into a problem on their Entitlement Services project after upgrading OM from 3.4 to 3.6. They followed all of the steps on the documentation; however, their gen.key file was somehow overwritten during the process. We are now working with them to try to recover as much of their data in their appDB as possible.

We can avoid situations like this in the future by recommending that customers make a copy of their gen.key prior to commencing their upgrade. There is an infobox on the page that recommends making a backup of the conf-mms.properties file before proceeding. This infobox should be modified to read:

It is crucial that you back up the existing conf-mms.properties and gen.key files because the upgrade process will delete existing data.

Alternatively, a new infobox should be added with a caveat about backing up the gen.key file. In either case, we should point out to customers how critical this file is to preserve and help them make sure they do not lose it during any upgrade processes.