Blink installation

[Wayne_Situ]

This is quoted from sk120193 Blink - Gaia Fast Deployment

"Upon completion of the deployment process, user gets a cleanly installed machine (with completed First Time Configuration Wizard) and the desired Hotfixes. In case of an Security Gateways upgrade, a configuration migration from the old version will be performed."

the gateway below had gone through 2 blink installations from R77.30 to R80.10, then R80.10 to R80.40.  in both cases we execute blink --reimage.  I was assuming blink built me a new image each time.  Recently I've discovered that's not the case.  

example #1:

[Expert@FW01:0]# cd /var/log/opt

[Expert@FW01:0]# ls -l
total 32
drwxrwx--x 3 admin root 4096 Jan 15 2018 CPcvpn-R80
drwxrwx--x 3 admin root 4096 Sep 30 23:02 CPcvpn-R80.40
drwxrwx--- 3 admin root 4096 Apr 18 2019 CPshrd-R77
drwxrwx--- 3 admin root 4096 Nov 8 02:24 CPshrd-R80
drwxrwx--- 4 admin root 4096 Nov 12 13:33 CPshrd-R80.40
drwxrwx--- 3 admin root 4096 Aug 11 2017 CPsuite-R77
drwxrwx--- 3 admin root 4096 Jan 15 2018 CPsuite-R80
drwxrwx--- 3 admin root 4096 Sep 30 22:43 CPsuite-R80.40

example #2:

we use Suspicious Activity Monitoring.  I noticed the SAM database (sam.dat - file of all sam rules) was preserved.

I chose to reimage with blink.  why did it kept some of the old files and directories?  what else it kept from previous version?

has anyone noticed this or experience any problems?

[PhoneBoy]

Blink reinstalls but doesn’t completely reformat the drives.
The only way to do that is by booting an ISO off USB, which is needed to leverage xfs in R80.40+ as that also requires a different partitioning scheme.
Perhaps @Tsahi_Etziony or someone on his team can comment further.

[Boaz_Orshav · Accepted solution]

Indeed, the Blink installs a new version and not a clean machine.

It actually creates a new partition and extracts the new version to that partition (similar to Deployment Agent - CPUSE).

Hence things like partition size, file system and all files on the log partition  (or any partition other then lv_current) will not be changed