Novell 6.5 Server Upgrade (ST) – Students

This upgrade went amazingly well. The Student Server (ST) was returned to service about 5:30pm, Thu, 6/24.

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Major work to upgrade the Novell servers to version 6.5 will be performed starting Fri, June 18. We have developed a plan that will limit the number of hours of downtime and the number of users affected at any one time. Specific workdays include:

All-Day Fri, June 18: Faculty/Staff Server (FS)

All-Day Thu, June 24: Student Server (ST)

Sometime the week of 6/28: Special Applications (FSAPPS) for Goldmine, TMA, Tick-it, Preservation Plus (Info Systems will post the planned date by end of day Friday, 6/25)

IMPORTANT: “All-Day” means the outage will likely begin 6-7am in the morning and last until 5-6pm. It also means that in order to complete an undisturbed backup of the systems users should NOT be using the systems after 9pm of the preceding day.

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Details for the Thursday, June 24 Outage:

USERS AFFECTED:
– Students

SYSTEMS AFFECTED:
– Student Network disk drives (P:, G:, Z:, etc), Network Printing
– Faculty Network disk drives on Student (ST) server (V:, W:)
– Computer labs for Student logins

SYSTEMS THAT SHOULD REMAIN FUNCTIONAL:
– Internet Access
– EMU Website (www.emu.edu)
– Email
– Oracle Calendar
– Student Info System (AS400, Jenzabar)
– Blackboard
– Library catalog (Sirsi)
– Faculty network drives (P:, Z:, etc)
– Faculty/Staff network drives other than those listed in “SYSTEMS AFFECTED” above.

COMMUNICATIONS: During the outages we will be posting status reports to the Critical Info Alert system which will display on the EMU Connection page. The voicemail greeting on the EMU Helpdesk (x4357) will also reflect the current system status.

ONE MORE CAVEAT: This is a very complicated upgrade. Info Systems staff have been testing and planning for it since early March. At this point we believe the schedule outlined above is reasonable and practical for us to achieve. However, it is possible that we will encounter last minute difficulties that will require us to adjust these dates. It is our strong desire to keep these dates, but there is always risk that a significant problem will develop that would change these plans.

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The Upgrade is completed for ST

Sequence of events that occured:

log on to both testupd and st using the migration wizard.

Several people were still logged in – some had open files. These open files were not backed up – oh well.

Disable the accounts of these users so that the migration of the data would not fail.

Migrated the data

performed the rest of the migration utility.

Installed the rest of the nw 6.5 functions from the “products” CD. Seemed to work, but the “closing programs” dialog box stayed open. Manually closed that windows and rebooted server – seemed to not have any problems.

Web server failed to load. Exported server host certificates and imported them back into LDAP. That seemed to take care of the problem.

During migration of data several users failed – 0k file sizes – due to out of space errors – probably due to compressed file. These users Home directories were restored from tape.

Sweep was not able to be copied from the old server’s directory. I had to go into NDS, delete the ST sophos object, and do a re-install on the server to get it happy.

FTP, ldap, powerchute novastor were all loaded and appeared to work.

Upon reboot of the server, serveral items didn’t load properly. It seems to be due to other items that were loading not being completed (the server is too fast). Changed load order – that seemed to help. Changed load order again, using the “?” to pause the loading of several items. Also changed the value of the “?” to be 15 seconds. Things now seem to load properly.

It appear that if Novastor is loaded, you need to unload it before downing the server to allow the server to down properly.

Duration: 12 hours

Assigned Technicians: Dan Marple Jr