Smoother upgrades

Upgrading from one version of NIS to another (including 2011 to 2012) doesn't preserve local policy customizations, which is a problem for many users.

 

Here are three examples:

 

1) I always add a general firewall rule to enable local admin machines to access clients.  These are deleted on every upgrade, and have to be re-added manually.  This is problematic when updating the client remotely.  It is painful in any case, as there is is a list of a dozen or so ip/subnet masks that must be added to the rule.

 

2) I always disable outbound e-mail scanning because this is done more efficiently on our mailservers.  This is re-enabled on every upgrade and should not be.

 

3) Because of (2), I have to set e-mail to "Ignore" in the system summary status.  This is also reset to "monitor" and should not be.

 

Upgrades should not be resetting policy configured by previous versions.  The current behavior requires me to upgrade every client PC personally (I have multi-PC licenses and a geographically dispersed set of users).  If the upgrades maintained our customizations, I could have the client PC's owers do the upgrades in a few keystrokes.

 

Please make upgrades preserve all policy configured in a previous version.  (There are already mechanisms to reset to defaults for anyone who needs them.)

 

Thanks.