Worst Practices Submission for LS10

I know Bill and Paul are not doing this session at Lotusphere this year but here's an oldie but a goody and it still happens today, er I mean recently(last week).

When moving your data center you should always:

1) Let everyone know with enough time in advance when you will be moving so things like the VOIP phones and Email/Webmail will be down and not surprise everyone.
2) At the cut over date, remind everyone in and NOT in the office you are about to down the servers.
3) Shut down ALL servers appropriately.
4) Tag and label each box, cable, jack, port, router, monitor, keyboard, hub...just....in....case!

Yes, there are a million and one other things to add to the list.

Now let's look at what really happened:

1) We were told the move would be on a Thursday/Friday. No time specified.
2) Thursday came everything was fine, figured they decided Friday was better.
Went to lunch, came back, nothing was up any more.
3) We hope they shut everything down properly, AIX box was the last man standing, luckily they hadn't removed it's console monitor or keyboard, although the whole network was already in pieces so we could shut it down gracefully.
4) Primary Web Server AWOL, although perfectly accessible internally, not accessible externally. Took a few days for them to ask me to look into it, I pinged it and yes it was down, but up on the inside. Pinged it inside, wrong IP address. Checked the box.....they plugged the LAN cable in the wrong Ethernet port on the server. Swapped and amazingly all was well again. Amazingly Sametime suddenly worked again too.

So the next time you move servers or data centers just remember the time you put in upfront saves hours or days in the end.

Domino 8.0.2 AIX Upgrade, 10 minutes

In my previous AIX Upgrade post although it was a great guideline to follow, I see it needs some clarifications.

In doing my 802 Lotus Domino upgrade on my AIX server, a dual partition server I might add, I followed my notes. But I was vague on some parts.

Last Minute EDIT:
Forgot to mention, type bootinfo -y at a shell prompt to see if you are a 64 bit server or not.

The Domino files for 802, now known as C1K3AEN for the 32 bit version and C1K3BEN for 64 bit, MUST be in the /opt/lotus directory if you want it to install properly. I know some unix guy out there will say, no it doesn't, but as a non-unix geek, I go with what works, so put it in the correct place.

The rest does work as detailed previously.

10 minutes to update it, sweet!
OK, if you are not already up to date on AIX levels it may take you more preparation time.

Step by Step guide to upgrade to Domino 801 AIX

Takes 10 minutes to upgrade to 801 then restart the box.
Hours to download the AIX updates and patches and get the server ready.
By the way there is a 32 and 64 bit AIX Domino code available depending on what you prefer.

You may want this page as a starter if you are new or lost to AIX:

The 801 docs may have some discrepancies. In our case the AIX server was at tech level 5300-04, which is what R80 asked for.(1.5GB)
However 801 asks for 5300-05.(300MB)
Naturally updated it to the latest one, 5300-08SP1. (2Gb)

Steps to follow:
1) Get the updates from the nice IBM site of Fix central.

2) While downloading the AIX updates, get the latest Domino server code from Partnerworld or Passport or your CD or Business Partner.

3) Make sure you have the root password and start a ftp session to your server(presumably you have FTP running on it) and move the Domino code to a place with enough space to untar(like zip format) it. DO NOT UNTAR in Windows, always use the AIX OS for this.

4) FTP the AIX OS updates to the server.
5) At the AIX console, or via telnet to it, login, then type SMIT this will bring up the program to help install the updates.
6) Select the first option which should say Install Software or Update OS
7) Select Install, Install All
8) Will prompt for a location, put it in the format of /dir/filesdir and hit return.
9) Hit Return at the details screen as the defaults should be acceptable, if not, change them accordingly.
10)Press Return again as it asks to make sure you want to upgrade.
11) You should see the system either start the upgrade or review what it will install and continue or press Return until it starts scrolling very fast.
12) Once done scrolling, in our case 456 patches later, it will return a prompt and you need to restart the AIX server.
13) At the AIX console tell the server to Shutdown -Fr
14) once the server has come back up and you relogin as Root, you will untar the Domino code. Type tar -xvf filename(801 32 bit is C18XQEN.tar). It will create a directory called AIX in the same directory where the *.tar file is located.
15) Make sure your Domino servers are stopped on the box, then type the following:
cd aix
cd domino
export DISPLAY=DominoAIX:0 (this command sets up a display variable if you didn't have one)
./install
16)Install will either popup in graphical mode(hopefully) or not. In our case it wasn't going to happen so we did it via console mode.
17) As long as you can read the screen, it is just as simple as a Windows install.
asks for locations, names, logins, etc. and then runs the process.
If it does not return to a command prompt you had a problem someplace with disk space.
18) Once you get a command prompt restart the AIX box.
19) If you can see your console from the Admin client or Java console, if enabled, then click Yes if prompted to update your names.nsf.
20) If you can not access it from the clients then you need to login as the Lotus login and password after you have telnet back in or see the console come up if in front of the server.
21) Now type cd /serverdirectory
/opt/lotus/bin/server

This will bring up the server in your session and see if it asks to upgrade or just runs the process. Once it is done and finished with all updating et al, type Q to shut down the server.
22) At the AIX console tell the server to Shutdown -Fr and if your server is on automatic you are done.

Check it comes up from a client and go on your merry way.

Anything I missed or need to change let me know. Should have made this a Wiki. hmmmm

Series P Brought to you by the letters A..I..X

As some know, my mission for the last few months was to upgrade a P series/AIX box to Domino R801. I will refer to it as an AIX box because that's how old it is.
And I think P series was a lousy name for a product which excellent brand recognition.

What you may not know is I am not a Unix person, sure I have installed Domino all over on everything, but one really needs to use this everyday to remember it all. If you must know I prefer AS/400's and Mainframes but bread and butter is Windows.

So I put it off while looking into more details. We did move the files there and install it, but it never took.

So as our machine comes to a halt figured it was time to do it again.

First stop? OS. Seems it is not the latest version and Domino threw a warning that we needed to update it.
Fine, go to IBM's site, locate a download spot for AIX, fill in the version, and it gives me what I need.

1.5GB of download updates.

Yes, 1.5GB, so let it run, then when done need to ftp it to the AIX box.

After some miscommunication with passwords of the root user I was able to install all 315 or so patches.

Decided I was too tired to install Domino now. Will do it tomorrow.
I have now relearned more about AIX than I remember and you know what, it feels good to do something different for a change.

Next up, Sametime integration with Quickr after rebuilding the Sametime cluster.
The fun never ends.