Saturday, March 20, 2010

Migrating Traveler

We've all come across it.  There comes a time in an admins life when you have to move a server instance from one piece of hardware to another piece of hardware.  Usually it's an EOL situation, hardware upgrade or even for DR testing purposes.  Moving Domino is usually an extremely easy task.  Shut down Domino on the old server, install the application on the new server to match your old server, copy/paste, rename servers, reboot, smoke cigar.  But when another Domino based add-on into gets in the mix, things could get a little tricky.  Or at least, a heightened paranoid level.  But as I found today, moving Traveler to a new server because the old one was EOL, was really pretty straight forward and simple.  And didn't require the users to have to do anything.  Here's my steps:  (Mind you, YOUR mileage may vary so test or have a good backup on hand, just in case.)
1.  Shut down old Domino server, not the hardware.
2.  Copy/paste all Domino .nsf's from old server to new server.
3.  Copy over the servers .id and .ini
4.  Don't forget the .kyr and .sth files too!
5.  On the old server, access the folder \Lotus\Domino\Data\traveler
6.  Copy all of the folders that exist there.
7.  Paste the folders to the new server under the same folder structure.
8.  Finish renaming and readdressing the servers as needed.
9.  Don't forget to disable the Domino service on the old server before you reboot!
10.  Reboot servers and launch Domino on the new server.
That's it.
Once the server came back online, I did a sync with my iPod touch and whamo-o!  Instant sync.
Earlier in the week, I had opened a ticket with Lotus support, and they had informed me that move to a new server was not a problem, but the users may have to resync all their data and that could take a while.  That's when I got to thinking and found that all of the current sync data exists in the above folder structure.  Copying those folders to the new server made the first sync to the server appear like it hadn't missed a beat.  I love it when Lotus makes things nice and simple.  Time for that cigar.

2 comments:

William Eberle said...

That's great to know!

One slight variation I incorporate is to rename the NOTES.INI on the old server so that it is even harder to inadvertently start up the old Domino Server.

Andy Donaldson said...

Hi William,
Since the old and new server were going to have the same production name, keeping the notes.ini the same was not a problem. Thanks for stopping by!