Patent ID: 8683458

Claim:
A method comprising: detecting, by an upgrade manager of a network appliance, that an upgrade of a network appliance via an upgrade patch has failed, the upgrade manager comprising a component of the network appliance that controls upgrades of the network appliance; in response to the detecting, determining, by the upgrade manager, that the network appliance is to be modified using a full install image of the network appliance, the full install image comprising a collection of software packages in a pre-installed state that can be unpacked to create an executable image; scheduling, by the upgrade manager, an unattended install of the network appliance for a specific time determined by the upgrade manager; and performing, by the upgrade manager, the unattended install of the network appliance at the specific time, wherein the performing the unattended install comprises: reserving a staging area in a memory of the network appliance, the staging area comprising a swap partition of a hard drive of the network appliance; obtaining the full install image from an upgrade server; storing the obtained full install image in the staging area; obtaining configuration information of the network appliance that is used locally by the network appliance to operate; storing the configuration information in the staging are to be accessible to a process of the obtained full install image; identifying the staging area as bootable; rebooting the network appliance; and installing the obtained full install image onto the network appliance.