NetWare 4.11 to NetWare 6 migration

Nutter gives a user advice for upgrading with as few problems as possible

My company is moving to NetWare 6 and an IP-only environment. What are the minimum services I could get by with on a NetWare 6 server? I know I will need Service Location Protocol (SLP) and will need to migrate to Novell Distributed Print Services (NDPS) from queue-based printing. My thoughts are to get the migration done and then roll out some of the other services such as iPrint, iFolder, etc.

Do you know of any Technical Information Documents (TID) that mention any specific order or preference in setting up certain services so you don’t have port conflicts? Also, is there a good method for backing up Novell Directory Services (NDS)? We have Arcserve 6.61 for NT with a NetWare client agent. It doesn’t seem to work, and I was wondering what most people do to ensure they have something that would back up NDS before introducing eDirectory? I have heard of creating a server with a root partition and then unplugging it just to have around, but this seems very risky. (I will be trying it out in a test environment for fun!)

– Via the Internet

The best thing I can recommend is to follow the KISS principle on the upgrade. I would migrate the server you have to NetWare 6 exactly as it is. Once you have verified that everything is OK, you can start making the changes to go IP only and switch to NDPS. That way you have more time to make the changes and fix problems than if you did it all at once. Your thoughts on how to do it are dead on. I would suggest looking at TID 10066060 for the upgrade process; that should give you a good idea as to what to think about.

For server backup, I have had the best results with Veritas Backup Exec. My preference is to run it on a NetWare platform, but it sounds like that isn’t an option for you. If you make the change to Veritas, make sure that the Novell server is on the latest support packs that Veritas has tested. Also make sure that you have the latest updates from Veritas applied.

As to the order of installation for services to avoid port conflicts, I wasn’t able to find any TIDs on that. What I would recommend is to add the services you want to use one at a time, making sure that each is up and running correctly before moving on. Some of the services give you the option of changing port numbers. From my experience, I haven’t had to change port numbers when using multiple services on a Novell server that were written by Novell.

There is a poor man’s way of backing up NDS before going to eDirectory. On NetWare 4, you can use dsmaint to make a backup on NDS before making changes. In NetWare 5 and later, that functionality has been moved into nwconfig.nlm. I’m glad you’re doing some testing in the lab. I would recommend putting a server in the tree and then shutting it down for a prolonged period of time. I would expect to have some NDS problems at some point in that situation.