Saturday, June 21, 2008

ND8 Upgrade Step 1 - Upgrade the design of the Domino Directory

Today I made the first leap into my ND8 upgrade project by upgrading the design of the Domino Directory to the 8.0.1 design. It went well for the most part except I missed a pubnames.ntf on a test server and it replicated the 7 design back to all the servers before I knew it. Opps. But in the end, it was an easy enough fix. So for those that have not yet made the jump to the ND8 design, here's what I did:
**When doing any project of this level, it of course is important to make sure that you have good backups**
1. Shut down all the Domino servers in the domain.
2. On the Administration server, I copied the 8.0.1 pubnames.ntf, (the new one that was released to fix desktop policies issues that Andy Pedisich had discovered and blogged about), overwriting the current version that was there.
3. I then ran a batch file I had created during testing and placed it in the program folder of the Domino server with the following commands in it.

ncompact -c -d -i names.nsf
nupdall -r names.nsf
nfixup -f -j names.nsf
ndesign -f names.nsf
nfixup -f -j names.nsf
ncompact -c names.nsf
nupdall names.nsf -t "($ServerAccess)" -r
nupdall names.nsf -t "($Users)" -r

This may seem like overkill to some, but how often do you have a chance to REALLY do a deep clean of your Domino Directory?
4. I then renamed the log.nsf so a new one would be created and make it easier to monitor
5. Once complete, I then launched the Domino server and watched for any problems.
6. No problems were found so I then began to copy the pubnames.ntf and the names.nsf, via the OS, to each of the downed servers in the domain. When the copy was complete, I brought the server up and tested replication, iNotes login, mail flow, etc.
7. After all of the servers are updated and brought back up, continued to monitor for issues.

Except for the one $&*@&#$$@ server that I overlooked, it is a pretty straight forward process. So if you haven't started your upgrade yet, get movin!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Andy,

I'm looking forward to hearing more about the upgrade.

Out of curiosity why shutdown all servers in the domain (when there are other ways to stop the design replicating)?

Andy Donaldson said...

For me, shutting down all the servers is just something I prefer to do because I'm paranoid about things ;-)

Anonymous said...

What is scope of your upgrade?

Is this your "personal" domino infrastructure; a small company; or a large enterpise upgrade?

Anonymous said...

Hey Andy - if you make a comment of the pnab template (getting rid of the Lotus default rep id) that helps in avoiding this problem

Andy Donaldson said...

@anonymous The size I would say is small to mid enterprise. About 20 servers were involved with the upgrade yesterday. Luckily, we are still at a point in the company where I can get backing to shut everything down for an hour or so an the hub sever and a couple of hours for the remotes. In all, I had things back up and working in short order for a Saturday morning. Luckily, its a quiet time of the year and not our busy season.

@Paul (My celtic soul-brother) Mooney - Good point sir. Guess I owe you a Coors Light for that one.

JYR said...

Hi Andy,

about the OS copy of your NAB

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd6forum.nsf/55c38d716d632d9b8525689b005ba1c0/2bef9c92986d60f8852574340059861a?OpenDocument

Just be careful :-)

JYR