Come end of last week, we started upgrading our servers to release 8.5.1. I did test upgrade of our development server couple of days back and find it incredibly easy. All test servers were installed in some 15 minutes. Without a glitch. Yeay for us and let’s go upgrade our production servers.

First in line were our internal servers. It took my colleague a significant amount (and by significant, I mean up to 5 times what was our worst case prediction) of time to upgrade.  Upgrade went without a glitch. Problem was, that one server couldn’t start up JVM anymore and both internal servers were now failing to log people in. First was solved by copying JVM from one of our 8.5.1 servers. Second, was a tedious task of finding an option to disable SSO using AD instead of Notes Address Book.

With that sorted and running for several days, it was time to start upgrading remaining servers. One of them runs on 64 bits, btw. Install went fine, quick and did not enable SSO with AD.  Hurrah! Other servers (32-bit ones) were not as kind. All failed to work after starting for the first time. Seemed to be some problem with java controller. Disabled it and ran the server. Failed. I then performed an upgrade again, at which point, install program started bitching as windows service for Domino Server was already of the same version. Ignoring that, I ran the server again. Nope, service shut down with erra again. I then disabled java controller at start up and started the server, only to quit it as soon as it was fully operational. Why? To enable java controller. After performing that task, I started the service, again, and then it finally worked. Yipi!

The only server remaining on 8.0.2 is our Sametime server, which runs on Linux. As far as I know, 8.5.1 is still not out for RHEL.