How to Uninstall Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

This process is to be followed to completely uninstall Alation.

Important

Doing anything described below will result in permanent loss of catalog data.

All these commands are to be run as “root” or SUDO, outside of Alation shell.

Prerequisite

Before you uninstall, take note of the paths to your data and backup files. They are needed for one of the commands you will issue as part of the uninstall. The disks mounted on /opt/alation/alation-XXXX/data1 and /opt/alation/alation-XXXX/data2 are your data and backup disks (XXXX stands for your Alation version, for example: alation-5.10.1.89638).

You can run the following command to find out the paths:

tail /opt/alation/alation/.disk*

To uninstall,

1. Stop Alation:

   /etc/init.d/alation stop
   

2. Verify that everything is unmounted from chroot:

   mount | grep alation
   

3. If anything is still mounted, unmount any remaining stubborn mounts (XXXX stands for the Alation version):

   umount /opt/alation/alation-XXXX/data1
   umount /opt/alation/alation-XXXX/data2
   umount /opt/alation/alation-XXXX/proc
   umount /opt/alation/alation-XXXX/dev
   

4. Verify that everything is unmounted from Chroot:

   mount | grep alation
   

5. Unistall Alation. On RHEL/CENTOS, do graceful uninstall first, and only if it fails, perform ungraceful uninstall.

RHEL/CENTOS RPM graceful uninstall:

rpm -qa | grep alation
rpm -e alation-XXXX

RPM ungraceful uninstall:

rpm -qa | grep alation
rpm -e alation-XXXX --justdb

Remove startup:

chkconfig alation off
chkconfig --del alation

Debian/Ubuntu DEB graceful uninstall:

dpkg -l | grep alation
sudo apt-get --purge remove alation-XXXX

Remove startup:

update-rc.d alation disable

6. Remove the etc/init.d script:

   rm -f /etc/init.d/alation
   

7. Remove any lingering install files:

   rm -rf /usr/local/alation_legacy
   rm -rf /usr/local/alation/*
   rm -rf /opt/alation/*
   

8. Remove alternatives:

   • Run the following command, outside of the Alation shell, to list all the packages:

     update-alternatives --display alation
     

   • For each Alation package, run the following to remove (XXXX stands for the Alation version):

     update-alternatives --remove alation /opt/alation/alation-XXXX
     

   • Then run the following command again to verify there are no remaining packages:

     update-alternatives --display alation
     

9. Remove data.

   Important

   You will NOT be able to recover any data after this step is run.

   rm -rf <path to data>/*
   rm -rf <path to backup>/*
   

Now, you have uninstalled Alation.