SnTT - Reminders for those Upgrading from R5

Yes, I said R5, 5.0.9a to be exact.

I have been quiet for a few days as I have been off site reminding myself why I hate Windows 2008 and why I loved R5.

Windows 2008 seems to not be configured for SMBs out of the box. No surprise there.
But when it is a stand alone server so to speak in an SMB(should have gone Foundations in this case, but that's a whole other post for some other time) well it just takes a little longer to make it useful, say compared to Win 2003 or even 2000. This is now the 2nd server like this in 2 weeks, so if someone has some better advice I will pass it along to the server builders.

First if you want the new server to see the old server, or anything else, you have to enable some Services like UpnP and Computer Browser. And Netbios will help too.
Make sure network discovery is enabled on the windows 2008 machine too so others can find it, like this poor old Windows 2000 R5 server.

Now that R5 server in this case was setup with some odd settings. For instance, a made up FQHN (Fully Qualified Host name). Because they weren't using it for web mail or web apps(they do use it for email and apps just not web).
So when you go to build your new server(in place upgrade was not likely given the new hardware and other reasons) you probably think you can just enter the old server name and get the NAB? In this case you would be wrong.

You see IBM decided that these days everyone uses a web server or some other reason for a FQHN and now will not talk to the older server, no matter what IP, name or anything you try IF the FQHN is not valid. What is worse is if you try to tell the new server to get the copy of the NAB you have in a file or on a cd...it still demands a server name and FQHN to work!

OK, even knowing that(it's in the info centers of R8 admin)it would never occur to me, or you probably, that the name in the field in the server doc was....invalid! Dead, not used, not even in the domain! So I started thinking way back to R5 time and how we used to build servers. Which to be fair isn't much different today, but in this case saved me some time.

The Domino server name did not match the computer name which in turn did not match anything else. The Port name is what helped. Copied the port name to the FQHN field and restarted the server and poof, all completed.

No more 20% complete and server not responding error.

Between these 2 things I spent the better part of the afternoon. Oh and then their firewall which is out of date and support and maintenance would not let me see the server from the web to test traveler or webmail. I tested them using Wifi and my phone but we took more time to figure out the firewall. Remember this, if you find a R5 server in the wilderness, you will also find the equivalent firewall, pcs, routers and switches from 5-10 years ago. So load up on memory, ancient memory, and just go do it but think before you leap as the old configuration really worked well and you have to reconfigure it for the modern era.

There is also a long discussion going on about how they use Domino for outgoing emails only and they use an outside ISP for incoming and use Notes as their email. We are moving it all back to Domino but I never cease to be amazed at the configurations I find.

DAOS will be a big bonus for them in time as will the new switch they have to get after we found the one we were using was only doing 33kb/sec. No wonder they thought the mail server was slow. Now it moves at 10-15MB/sec while we reconfigure the hardware. Sometimes it's really NOT Domino's fault.

And yes, the iPhone CEO is really happy with traveler.

BES, Sametime, Java and Your Windows Upgrades

Warning, danger ahead, read only if you like Java, BES, Domino and Mobile Sametime clients.

I got tagged to resolve a Sametime clients using BES error which popped up after a recent NOS update to Windows 2008. BES works fine, but Sametime clients on blackberries couldn't login.

Naturally open up the BES manager and it shows MDS is not started, BB_IM is not started either. Go check the Windows Services, shows 3 services not starting, shows 1067 error when you try to start them.

Not much out there on this while searching.

I figured DNS issues or router issues.
Wrong. IP checks out fine and both ways.

Stconfig.nsf missing the BES IP address?
Wrong. It's still there.

BES had an update last week and I figured, well it doesn't work now....
Wrong. Oh, the update went fine, but ST on a BB still not working.

RIM released updated ST clients 2.1.18(and 2.1.21 for BB Curve). Maybe...
Wrong. They work fine and install properly if you follow my document I wrote previously. If you don't have it ask me for it.(will post it after I update it with new info)

Login bad? LDAP information missing?
Wrong.

Disk Space? temp file corruption?
Wrong, all fine and cleared.

Domino maybe? Updated Domino to 8.5 HF3 which shows 8.5 211 afterwards(don't ask see the chart on this technote).
Wrong. Oh and you can install the HF3 OVER HF1 or HF2, contrary to the wording in Fix Central.

Java Update? Check Java, type java -version at a command prompt.
DING! DING! DING! We have a winner! No java version is shown, as an error is shown.
HMMMMMM

Went to java.com, checked had latest one and it did.
Checked Path statement....no Java path.HMMMMMM
Added c:\program files\java\jre6\bin to path. Nope no change.

Now I am wondering what else is wrong. Almost ready to give up then remembered previous problem from another BES upgrade. So I reinstalled BES upgrade to 4.1.6.5 just in case. Rebooted, still no luck.

Figured if Java didn't install correctly, maybe a fresh install will do. Found the download page and reinstalled it.

Miracle of miracles. Did Windows 2008 make a mess of this? Did the Java Updater get stuck or crash? Who knows.

The owner almost immediately Sametime's me from his cell phone! No better feeling than that one. Another happy customer. Wait till he gets the Connection client I sent him. Trying to seed his usage for a Connections project. :-)

So the moral of this story is think like a flawed machine to fix one.