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Novell Server Service Pack 6 Upgrade

File Server

Novell Service Pack 6 needs to be installed prior to hardware upgrade migration process planned in late October or early November.

The planned outage for this Service Pack upgrade is Saturday morning, 10/04/03

Systems that will be UNAVAILABLE:
Novell Network Disks/Printers (FS, ST, FSAPPS, STAPPS)
Novell NDS Authentication Services:
– EMail (all clients)
– Calendar

Systems that WILL REMAIN available:
EMU Web Server (www.emu.edu)
Blackboard (http://bb.emu.edu)
Sadie (Library Catalog System)
AS400 (CampusWeb)

The installation is expected to take 6 to 9 hours. The process will begin about 6am.
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Close-out Note as of 1:00pm, Saturday 10/04/03:

This upgrade process went very well. All servers returned to service by 11:30am, Saturday, 10/4/03.

Thank you, Dan Marple Jr, for doing a superb job of planning and implementation of this service pack upgrade that involved 6 production Novell servers. This is probably a first to have *NO GLITCHES*!

— Jack Rutt —

= = = = = = = Follow up Comments = = = = = = = =

In preparing for the SP6 upgrade I ran DSREPAIR. This gave me errors on 4 servers. This error was a -771 in reference to “error initializing schema cache”. No matter what I did I couldn’t resolve the error. Following TID 10063329 I did the following on the NS server:

Downed it,
restart using “server -ndb”
ran a local repair
down
restart normally.

This seemed to resolve the errors. I decided not to do anything further till Sat morninng. On Sat Morning I bounced all servers and ran a DSREPAIR on all of them. No errors were reported. Why – I’m not sure.

What was accomplished this outage:

1. Install SP6 on the following servers: NS, LD, FSAPPS, FS ST STAPPS.
2. Image all servers before and after upgrade.
3. No drivers were changed during the upgrade.
4. No files were backed up using the SP backup routine.
5. FSAPPS was upgraded to 2GB memory.

— Dan Marple Jr. —

Novell server FSAPPS was crashing

File Server

FSAPPS file server was behaving irradically. When trying to run DSREPAIR and do an unattended repair, the nlm hung.

Other access seemed to be normal, so nothing was initially done. AFter an hour or so, things started to slow down, bindery connections were not permitted, and other “funky” things.

All users of goldmine were notified to log off the system.

The server was NOT able to be brought down gracefully. Meaning the server was powered down, all volumes were “verpaired”, and the server restarted.

All seemed normal after that.

The reason for this could have been because of:
1. Not enough memory,
2. Memory incompatibility – 2 512 chips and 2-128 chips – Novell recommends all chips be the same.

— Dan Marple Jr. —

Very Short Network Outage Early Monday, 9/1

Network

Very brief planned outage required to activate a new version of the central router’s operating system. This is needed to correct a flaw that prevents use of a new component added in July 2003 that provides gigabit connectivity for various servers.

It is possible that no outage will be perceived. If there is an outage all network services would be affected (i.e. email, Internet, Novell, Blackboard, Sirsi/Sadie (Library), AS400, Calendar).

This outage moved us from IOS 7.6(1) to 7.6(3). This did not take care of the problem with the 6148 Gig blade. Cisco states there is a hardwaree/software flaw where packets are being dropped. There is no resolution for this as of now They will be sending us a 6516 blade to use as a loaner till this problem is resolved.