Upgrading from Novell 5.1 to Novell 6

[IdahoTech]

Hello all once again,

I have a server that is running 5.1 and we are considering upgrading to Novell 6 to keep up with our other serves. Now I have built a server from scratch, but have never done a upgrade. HELP!! What do I need to be carefull of? What will not work on the server after the upgrade?

It is a 5.1 server with sp3 or 4 i believe. Also it is running nprinter. Now from what I have read in some areas INCLUDING Novell that NPrinter is not available. You can try it but it is possible that it will not work.

The server also has traditional drives and not NSS. What will happen here? To many questions.....

Well I may leave it just becuase there should be a new school come next year and thus we can get a new server, or if someone can help and point me in how to do it properly without blowing it up let me know. I have not just one but two backups of the drives. One set is the original drives the set I am working on is a imaged set that replaced the old drives and a set that is off site at the comapny that imaged the drives for me in case something horrible goes wrong.

Well any help would be good or some kind of info on what I need to pay particular attention to when upgrading. I await your responses and help.

Thanks

IdahoTech
'Only two things are infinite - the Universe and human Stupidity, and I'm not so sure about the Universe' Albert Einstein

http://www.sd60.k12.id.us

 

[Lou0686]

Hi,

I assume that you will be doing an In-Place upgrade. The one thing to remember is to have a backout plan. Make sure you have good tested backups. Have a spare set of drives with the server on it is fine except for item, how old is the data? If something goes miserably wrong and can't back out and you need to go to those drives, is the data current enought? How much will the business be aftected if you have to revert back to old data?

I have found that the quickest backout route is to break your mirrored set before the upgrade. (Down the server, remove the drive, bring the server up, then and only then do you break the mirror) This preserves the SYS volume on that drive.

Not sure on Nprinter since I have never run into it during an upgrade but if there is one section that is usually affected is old printing technology.

As far as the Volumes, you can leave them as traditional volumes.

Good Luck
Lou

 

[IdahoTech]

Hello Lou,

Thanks for the response. Well we are a school district and the server has been sitting for about two months while school has been out. We had someone image the dirves and put the new imaged drives into the system. The original drives are out of the sytem labeled and put into safe keeping.

The data is not updated on a day to day basis, yet but it will be once school is in and the secretaries and teachers start entering information for the new school year.

So basically you have not seen anything major other than the older printing technology having a problem? If the drives I update go bad I can always put the originals back in and then have them re imaged from that company again.

If anything goes wrong I will be back and thanks for the response.


IdahoTech
'Only two things are infinite - the Universe and human Stupidity, and I'm not so sure about the Universe' Albert Einstein

http://www.sd60.k12.id.us

 

[Lou0686]

Hi Idaho,

One thing that I would like to add and is a gotcha. After you upgrade the server and are applying the latest Service Pack (SP3), choose not to upgrade the installed drivers when prompted. I have seen issues with this especially when NIC teaming is involved.

Lou

 

[cabracy]

The NW5.1 to 6 process is real smooth. We just did 4 servers on a single day. The only issue we ran into was that the C drive was not big enough to hold the backups.

The prep was to make a backup copy of the data and also of trustee information. I use tbackup (free on the internet) for trustees.

Then boot the NetWare 6 CD and go. And then add service packs. Then on to the next server.

Be real careful if you decide to go back by putting old drives into a server. You can really hose NDS if this is a multi server tree.

Chris.

 

[IdahoTech]

Hey Chris,

When you say add the service packs your talking nwsp1 2 3 and the zenworks service packs as well correct?

Thanks for the information on tbackup I will look it up and check into it for our systems.

Thanks again.....

IdahoTech
'Only two things are infinite - the Universe and human Stupidity, and I'm not so sure about the Universe' Albert Einstein

http://www.sd60.k12.id.us

 

[cabracy]

I have been avoiding nw6sp3. There are still a few open issues. nw6sp2 does not need sp1 first, it is cumulative. But if you go that way, there are a few extra patches. ndp3sp2d, tcp605o, and nw6nss2b.

I'm not doing Zen here, so if that applies, apply that also.

Also Edir 8.6.2 has a few bugs (though I haven't run into any), so I will be taking all 9 servers in the tree to edir 8.7.0.4 over the next few days.

Chris.

 

[IdahoTech]

Good to know. Did not know that there were any problems with sp3. I have it only on two servers and they should hopefully be ok.

I will print that out to make sure I got all the proper patches.

Thanks Chris...

IdahoTech
'Only two things are infinite - the Universe and human Stupidity, and I'm not so sure about the Universe' Albert Einstein

http://www.sd60.k12.id.us