Upgrading NT box to W2k

[vbajock]

I have a Win NT 4 server running P-sql 2000i. I need to upgrade the operating system to W2k, doing a straight up upgrade instead of a clean install. If anyone has any warnings or tips on this please let me know
thanks

 

[MacolaHelp]

Everyone I know of that I respect in the networking world (something I don't claim to be an expert on, for sure), says to reinstall wk2k fresh rather than upgrade nt4. If you have all the latest ms patches available on a high speed download or local CD, you might survive the nt to win2k upgrade wuth minimal hair loss. If the hardware is equal to the task, you really might want to F disk & clean install & then apply the updates for win2k. I would if I was a "network expert" & I would ask my clients' network experts to do the same. Fresh is better. As many of us learned in the early days of win95, a quarterly f disk & reinstall eliminated many problems experienced along the way. If you've ever had the pleasure of removing msoffice through the registry to complete an upgrade from 97 to 2000, you will understand that the fdisk & reinstall saves you time and effort in the long run over troubleshooting an upgrade of a MS or MS dependent product.

 

[vbajock]

I know this is generally the rule and this is the one I follow, but in this particular case I might be better off doing a straight upgrade. I am looking for a good horror story to talk me out it.

 

[MacolaHelp]

Although I can't give you any serious details, last November a 20 user macola site w/50 or so PCs in a VERY small (<200) town hired a &quot;network expert&quot; from the nearest big city to migrate their nt4 servers (2) & win2k active directory server (1) to all win2k. They started on Friday afternoon & spent approximately 10 hours on the phone with microsoft trying to get it done & I believe it involved modifying registry keys & who knows what else. This is economical for the incident, but not necessarily for the client in support hours paid. I thought they were going to fdisk & install win2k fresh & this fellow was told he had to do the upgrade rather than a new install of the OS. When I arrived at noon on Saturday, they had users that couldn't see one server or the other. I finally got through it quite late on Saturday night. If you succeed at this, post some words of wisdom for us!

 

[vbajock]

Actually, I have done a number of successful upgrades of Win NT 4 servers to w2k. There were a couple of gotchas, but at this point I think I am aware of most of them. I have come to the conclusion that domain controllers should always be a clean install, as should web and firewall servers. Member servers, on the other hand, can be a judgement call. On this particular network, the domain controllers and the web server are all W2k. The NT4 box is dedicated to Macola, and is the only NT4 box on the network. The difference here is that this would be the first time I would be upgrading NT4 to W2k on a Macola app server. My question really goes more to the affect of an upgrade like this on PSql and Macola. Will they have to be reinstalled ? Will strange bugs creep into the clients, etc? I am hoping that the forum includes someone who has done something like this who might tip me off.

 

[MacolaHelp]

In my cases, I have gone from an old nt4 or netware server to a new win2k server. In these cases, I have the network people copy the macola app directories to the new server using the same mapped drive. I then install fresh the current version of pervasive they own or have purchased. I then install the pervasive client from the new server to the workstations & the macola client. As a precaution, I usually manually uninstall pervasive 7 client & odbc if going to pervasive 2000 as part of the migration process on the client workstations. I haven't tried to up from nt4 to win2k on the same server box, but would assume that since pervasive writes registry entries to either network OS, that you would experience some issue downline through an upgrade if you don't stop & remove the pervasive service from nt4 before the upgrade & then re-install their current pervasive version & restart the service after loading the win2k OS. I tried to search the pervasive devtalk website earlier today re: upgrade from nt4 to win2k & couldn't find anything of note. If you are a profit w/pervasive partner, try starting an incident there if no one here can help you from experience since you have a few free support incidents as a partner. In previous years, I have found them to be very helpful in the troubleshooting arena, but am a bit removed now since macola forces us to purchase pervasive through them: takes much longer to wade through the bureaucracy. I used one of my free support incidents on a 100% cpu utilitization problem recently & they were pretty helpful, though I think that my eventual fix came from patrick @ macola (suggestion to move the swap file to D instead of C on the macola server). In any case, good luck & I'll be eager to hear how it all turns out.

 

[vbajock]

Thanks for the info. I have two Pervasive support calls left on the freebee, and will give them a call.