Skip to main content

Lotus Domino 6.5.4 upgrade to Version 7.0

This morning I decided to upgrade our Notes server, well actually I decided last night but wanted to wait until the backup was complete. I'd decided to record the procedure here. I would have recorded it internally anyway but I figure this might be of use to someone. Lets hope it works, because I'm writing this "live" as it happens.

Precautions
The backup ran last night, and I've checked it on the server.Yep, it looks like all of the notes/domino stuff is there.This is a Friday tape (Friday B) which means that it wont be overwritten for another 4 weeks. it should be ample time to test the new system for problems.

If there is any doubt at the 4 week mark, I can always replace the Friday B tape with a new one.



Hard Drive Space
These are the figures from Drive D: Before the Upgrade.

Used Space = 29.4 GB
Free Space = 165 GB
Total Capacity = 195 GB


Procedure
1. Make sure that you put the Domino 7 CD into the drive the night before (when you were at work) - and do it before Friday drinks so that you don't put it in upside down or anything.

2. In the morning, use VPN to connect to our systems, then Remote Desktop to connect to the Notes/Domino server.

3. Check the Backup Status and ensure that it ran successfully (and is finished)

4. Check the hard drive status and note the sizes.

5. Go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Services and Stop the Lotus Domino Service.

6. Go to the CD Drive and Choose to install Lotus Domino Server (not express server). It is now 7.47 am.

7. At the Welcome Screen, click Next, then accept the licence and click next again.

8. Leave the Program Files Directory Name as D:\Lotus\Domino and the [_] Install Domino Partitioned Servers checkbox unchecked. Click Next.

9. Leave the Data Directory Name as D:\Lotus\Domino\Data and click next (btw: You should check both of these directories, by looking in windows explorer, just in case you have domino installed elsewhere and an older installation is being detected.

10. Leave the server type checkbox as Enterprise Server and click next.

11. Wait for the summary screen to appear (for some reason, on a test server, this took a few
seconds). Read the summary carefully and note the disk space figure: 856.7 MB. Click Next.

12. There is now a very worrying period where it draws a bar graph and says that it is uninstalling the old server. Fortunately this lasts for less than a minute. Then it starts installing the new server.

13. The installation completes at 7.55am and the computer wants to restart. Strangely enough my test environment did not as k for a restart.

14. I now have all of these nice new desktop icons, so after re-establishing a remote desktop connection with the server, I click one. (the Lotus Domino Server).

15. I'm prompted to Start it as a Windows Service (which I do) and also [X] Always start Domino as a service at System Startup. I choose these options and click Ok.

This was a bad thing to do. If anyone else is doing upgrades, don't choose this option because the service will start and ask some questions, but because it starts as a service, you won't see it load over a remote desktop connection.

16. I've tried to end the service, but because it hasn't finished starting, I couldn't. I've ended up having to do a server restart. Hopefully this won't screw anything up.

17. Ok, back to remote login, and I'm worried that I'll have problems since I chose to start the service automatically when the server starts. I may have to go into services and turn it off.

18. The server is obviously available because I can ping it but I can't remotely access it and all because of a stupid menu option. At this point 8.18am, I've decided to take the kids on a trip into work.

About 1 hour later...
I arrived at work, with the kids in tow... and sure enough, the notes server console was sitting on "Do you want to upgrade the Templates Y/N". I had been about to say No, but since I was IN at work now, I decided to say YES, because I had the previous night's successful backup tape in my hand.

The whole thing finished about 10 minutes later without any other keystrokes required, thus rendering my trip into work really really annoying.

Still... ...this was useful because it gave me a chance to run a lot of extended tests on our applications, all of which ran well. It also meant that the kids got a day out in town.


Hard Drive Space
These are the figures from Drive D: After the Upgrade.

Used Space = 29.7 GB
Free Space = 165 GB
Total Capacity = 195 GB

So the upgrade cost us a total of .3 GB (about 300 MB).
Impressive.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Shouldn't connecting to the RDP console would fix that issue with dialogs not being shown.

I always do any installation or troublesome task on the server connected to the console.

Popular posts from this blog

How to Change Your Notification Options for New Lotus Notes Mail in version 8.x

Don't worry, I'm not patronizing you (my readers), I just decided to re-document this for one of our internal users and thought you might want to be able to use it in your own user documentation. WHAT IS THIS DOCUMENT ABOUT? Some people who don't get a lot of mail, like to be notified when such an event occurs. Notification can be; via a sound via a pop-up box via the system tray (where the computer clock is) The pop up box looks like this; Other people, who like myself, get too much mail would rather not be notified. The aim of this document is to tell you how (and where) to turn these options on and off. CHANGING YOUR SETTINGS To change your settings from the Notes 8.x client; On the Menu, click File , then Preferences... On the left hand side , click on the little plus sign to the left of Mail to expand the options. Click on the option marked Sending and Receiving . In the middle section, under receiving, you can control your notifications. If you untick the box mark

How to Create an Auto-Response Mail Message in Lotus Notes 8.5.3+

Why would you do this? Suppose that you have an externally accessible generic email address for your company; support@mycompany.com or info@mycompany.com. You might expose this to the web and allow people to send messages to you. Setting up an auto-response email will tell the senders that their message reached its destination and that it will be dealt with accordingly.  It's also good practice to include links to FAQs or other useful information. Why 8.5.3 The techniques we'll be using here work in older versions of Notes but some of the options seem to have moved around in 8.5.3.  I figured it was a good time to show you where they've moved to. The Procedure Start Domino Designer and open the Mail file to be modified.  A really quick way to do this is to right-click on the application tab and choose "Open in Designer". In the Left hand panel of designer, expand Code and then double-click Agents.  A new window should appear. Click the action

How to Do a Mail Merge to Email using Lotus Notes

Why do one? In today's "green" world, it makes much better sense to send out emails than letters but you still want to personalize them. Sadly, by itself Lotus Notes doesn't support mail merge to email. Of course, we know that outlook does (but then it lets anyone and anything send emails for you - even when you don't want them to). So, how to do it in Notes? OpenNTF The first port of call is OpenNTF ( http://www.openntf.org/ ). This place is full of great things but most of them are really badly documented. Still, these guys give things away for free and they develop in their spare time, so we should be grateful for what we get. There's a great little project there called MailMerge Excel to Notes . Go there, click on releases and download the ZIP file. Getting to the Code The installation is tricky though I've noted that since I asked the author about the install, it's been updated (so maybe these steps are less necessary). Unzip the files to somewher