Text 10040, 226 rader
Skriven 2006-03-04 19:59:10 av Glenn Meadows (1:379/45)
Ärende: A long trip to NY (or how I spent my last 10 days) (Days 5 thru 10 here
===============================================================================
From: "Glenn Meadows" <gmeadow@comcast.net>

Long post, try not to re-quote the whole message back in any replies, to save
bandwidth..<LOL>.

Well, I'm back from NY, after 10 days dealing with various move and migration
issues.  Got back to Nashville Wednesday night, have taken the past 3 days to
de-compress, unwind, and deal via remote access with various continuous issues.
 I'm picking this narrative up in the middle of the 10 days, since the first 5
were prep of a second office a block away, as well as installing and
configuring a new mail server for operation in the office, more on that in a
different subject.

The goal, was to migrate 28 users and their existing computers from an NT4
domain, and integrate them into our Win2k3 AD domain.  Various issues were
moving data from the existing servers to our servers, keeping their desktops as
the joined to the new domain, and probably the most perplexing issue, was
dealing with their loss of access to Notes as their email server.

On Friday evening a week ago, we arrived at their closing office, hand truck in
tow, to remove their 2 servers, to get them over to our offices.  Also included
were 2 Snap servers.  One, and old one with 50 gig of storage, and a newer one
with 480 gig in a Raid 5 array setup (4 HD's).

It was right before that, that we discovered a MAJOR screw-up in the migration
planning.  We knew that Notes was going away, so for the past 30 days, the tech
at V2 was supposed to have pulled each users Notes mail down to Outlook, via
the Outlook Connector for Notes.  This is a tool supplied free by Microsoft, to
allow people to migrate from Notes to Outlook.  Me, not having access to Notes,
nor ever having used it before, I was at her mercy to do things correctly, and
fully.  Well, Friday afternoon, the reality of the problem presented itself. 
The Outlook Connector, allows you to Access a Notes server, but unless you
synchronize the local folder with the server, all you have in Outlook, are
Headers, and any messages you've read.  If the Notes server is not there, no
mail.  Most of these people have email that goes back 4-5 years, and they
really expect to have access to those archives.  This fatal flaw in our
migration plans, does have a silver lining though.

It was decided that V2 would copy all of the NSF files (same as PST files, but
are the Notes Mail files), over to a removable Hard Drive for us to take with
us as an offline archive.  There were about 76 gig of email files, took a LONG
time to transfer, as the Notes server only had USB1 ports on it. During that
time, was when we removed the 2 Compaq Proliant servers from the racks.  The
PDC is a Dual PIII 933, with 512mb ram, and 36 gig Raid 5 storage, and the 2nd
one is a PII 200, 256 meg ram.  So, we carted all of that gear over to our 5th
avenue offices, lugged into the office, and waited for all the other stuff to
arrive.

Computer migration was a large collection of Thinkpads and IBM S50 desktops. I
got a few of the Thinkpads delivered on Friday afternoon, while many of the
people took them home with them, so that delayed their migrations till Monday
AM when they got to their new offices.

Saturday, the first thing was to wrestle the 2 Compaq rack mount servers up on
top of a file cabinet that sits in the server area. (We recently moved the
servers out of an office, into an open space "cube" area, simply because they
needed the office for a real person to work in.  We don't have a "data area",
this cube happens to be where all the network cables/patching is done.  Most of
the wiring in the walls/floors is old Cat3 cable, and rewiring would be a real
bitch, and we're moving out of this space in 10-12 months, so we go with what
we've got).  Once I got them positioned, the booted up, and I was able to log
on, disabled their DHCP server, Wins server, and changed their IP addresses
from the V2 10.3.x.x subnet, over to our 192.168.10.x subnet, rebooted them
both, and now they were visible from our 2k3 servers, and I could actually fire
up the incoming computers, and log on with the V2 users logins and passwords,
as well as Admin on the V2 domain.  That allowed me to see what shares were
mapped from the V2 servers to each users login desktop (most of the laptops are
Win2k, the S50's are WinXP Pro).  Now the fun begins, migrating each user over,
so that they have their same desktops when logging in to our domain.

This was my first use of the XP provided tool, Migration Wizard.  I'm
impressed, it worked great.  AND, even though there is no MigWiz in Windows 2k,
one of the options is if you tell the Migration Wizard, that the machine you're
on is your NEW computer, it will offer to create a floppy disk that you can
take to your older computer (win98, ME, 2k) to run on that PC to move your
files and settings.  Well, Scott had already saved a copy of MigWiz in an Admin
area of our server, so for the Windows 2K machines, I just logged in as the V2
user, found our Artemisrecords server, logged in to that as Administrator, and
ran the Migration Wizard from the network share. I had it store all the
"migrated" info and files, right on the C drive of the machine being migrated. 
On some machines, that took about an hour to run, as it takes all their local
documents, and compresses them to one big file (I think it's one big file).

Next step on each machine, was to log in as the local Administrator (we got all
the local admin passwords, thank goodness), and switch domains.  Once the
machine was joined to the artemisrecords domain, then it was log on as the
specific user, with their new logon name and password, and run MigWiz again,
telling the application that this was the new machine, and navigating to the
locally stored data file.  That ran, and restored all the app settings and
files to their new profile.  Worked like a champ, solved many potential
problems.  On one box, I attempted to just rename the profiles after changing
domains, but that created all kinds of strange problems, so I reversed it and
reran MigWiz.  It even migrated their Notes application to their new desktop,
which later turns out to be a huge plus (I'll get to Notes shortly).  The nice
thing, is that I could start the migration process and just move from machine
to machine while they were all working.  During this time, I was also moving
files from the V2 servers to ours.  Their user name convention was strange.  If
I were a user, my login and shared file would be gxm, so, I had to interpret
different 3 letter combinations as they related to everyone's names, and some
were strange, for sure.

Doing this took the rest of the day Saturday and all of Sunday.

To complicate this issue even further, there were 5 users where V2 kept their
computers to re-use in an office in Miami, so on those systems, I had to
re-create their desktops.  We actually got one good condition ThinkPad, of the
same model and variety that everyone else was using (T-30), that had Notes
already on it, another nice "accident".  We had to provide new computers for 5
people, 4 laptops, one desktop.  We found in the "stash", 1 S-30 that I
migrated to the user that needed a desktop, and there were 2 other T-30's.  One
was the one that I mentioned in another thread that has the oddball keyboard,
and another where the keyboard had 4 keys with missing key-caps.  So, it was
off to CompUSA for 3 more laptops.  We bought Toshiba laptops with XP-Pro on
them.

Two other people needed new laptops as well.  One was just plain "worn out",
and the other, the LCD died on Tuesday.  Luckily, the first one that was worn
out, that user said he had no need for his old Notes Email, and was content
just using Office for a clean start.  The one with the dead LCD really needed
that, so rather than use the MigWizard, which I don't believe actually moves
installed apps from one machine to another, I remembered the new LapLink
program, "App Mover".  Bought a copy via online and download, installed it on
the dead LCD monitor box (external monitor attached).  This is probably the
best program to know about when you have to move from one computer to another. 
The serial number verifies your email and key when installed on the OLD box,
but not on the new one (this again will come in handy).  Once you have it
installed on both machines, they find each other by computer names, and you
start the "Move" process (they call it "packing the moving van" and "unpacking
the moving van"), the app goes to work doing it's thing.  After about an hour
of work (and the progress bar time to copy/remain was very accurate in it's
prediction of transfer time), it was done, and you were prompted to reboot the
new computer.

Reboot, and there is the full desktop of the old computer, all apps are in
place, and work as they did on the old PC (and everything is still left on the
old PC as well) (wonder about the license issues there, but usually you're
dumping the old PC).  A totally impressive product.  They tell you that it will
only move applications that do NOT exist on the new computer, and it will not
overwrite any existing data or information, and it does NOT move the OS.  I did
the first move on the dead LCD laptop, from Win2k to WinXP, and it ran
flawlessly.  I HIGHLY recommend this program if you're moving from an old
computer to a new one.  The only thing I haven't investigated, is how it works
in a multi-partition environment, as all of these boxes are single C drive
setups.

App Mover came in handy one more time, as well.  For one of the people who
needed a new PC, we used one of the Compaq laptops that came back in from one
of our terminated field people, and again, no Notes.  So, installed App Mover
on that box, and did a "move" again, and it brought Notes over, since Notes was
really the only app that was not on the new computer, thus allowing that user
to access his Notes history files.  Pretty cool application.

Notes.  One big problem with the Outlook connector for Outlook...once it's
installed, every time you start Outlook, the connector changes which account is
the default, back to the Domino Notes account.  No matter how many times you
change the default to your normal POP3 server (or any other account), it only
sticks for that session of Outlook.  As soon as you exit, and restart, the
Domino account is again the default, thus preventing you from sending mail,
since the Notes server is gone.  You still need the Notes connector, if you do
have email in the Domino account that you pulled the message down, you can read
it.  BUT, you can't MOVE the email into your PST based account, nor can you
copy it.  You get the error message that there is no online server, and the
message contains only headers, even though you've got it all.  A real bummer. 
If you uninstall the connector, you lose access to that file.  The mail is
stored in an NST file, not a PST, and without the connector, you can't read it,
and each time you start Outlook, you get switched to the Domino account as the
default.  Still investigating how to solve that one.  The connector starts
Domino in the background, so maybe a reconfiguration of Notes to tell it you're
disconnected (on an island) will solve that problem.  This is an issue with the
field people, who I haven't even gotten to and their laptops.

There are 5 people who are field sales/radio promotion people, who also have to
change from Notes to Outlook.  Trying to talk them through the changes on the
phone, was no good.  I sent a Word document with instructions, as well as
screen shots to show them how to configure for the new mail server.  All went
well, they were able to GET mail, but not send.  I even had all 5 send their
laptops in, 3 I did, connected with Outlook worked fine.  Sent them back to
them, they were unable to send.  Couldn't figure it out.  The last 2 laptops
arrived Friday in Nashville, so I worked on one today, it connected. Closed
Outlook, re-opened it, and no longer able to send, just receive. Upon
investigation, I found that the Domino account had re-established itself as the
default, even though I had selected the V2-Artemis account. Tried it 3 or 4
times, no joy on keeping the Domino account from selecting itself.

Tomorrow, Sunday, I'm going to try making changes to Notes, in telling it that
I no longer want to connect, that I'm "disconnected (Island)" they call it. 
See if that makes a difference.  I'm also putting a copy of their NSF files on
their local computers so they can use those as snapshot archives to read, copy,
paste from.

Now, the last neat application, is called Notes2Outlook.  This cool little
utility, will take and NSF file, and extract all the messages and import them
into Outlook for you. It's even aware of the PST file size limits, and will
halt the export/import before the file gets too large.  It also appears that
since it actually removes the messages from the file, you can then start a new
extract into an additional PST, and end up with multiple PST's for NSF files
that are larger than the 2gig file limit in Office 2000 and 2002.  There's even
a "button" to select ANSI mode, which is the Office 2003 version, which does
not have the 4 gig limit.  The program is exceedingly slow though, as it
extracts each message one at a time, then imports them one at a time.  It has a
batch mode, where you can create a csv file with path to the NSF file, and the
PST file, and send it on it's way.  The program requires Notes to be installed,
as well as Outlook to work.  It appears to start both apps in the background,
and manipulate the process by running macros to do the work.

Licensing is interesting, in that you buy it to allow for free updates for
specific time periods.  Say, 90 days.  You can use it after that, but in that
90 days, any updates, fixes released, or changes made because of particular
issues with your particular situation are free updates.  Works well.  I've got
35 of these suckers to convert.

Well, that's the recap of the week.  Oh, backbone setup is now an 9 port 1gig
switch that has our 3 servers connected together (all with 1 gig NIC's), and
the 2 main Netgear switches, using their 1gig uplink ports into the D-link 8
port.

Interface to the internet is through a Watchguard Firebox, feeding our T-1.
Mail server is Surgemail.


--

Glenn M.

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