Sometimes familiarity breeds contempt, doesn’t it?
Often we can’t see the wood for the trees – the small irritations swamp the wealth of features that work brilliantly…
Well today was a day when I remembered what makes Domino great. My Windows-based Domino Mail server (really a recycled IBM P4 PC with 2GB RAM) was overheating and beginning to struggle, so it was time to stop putting off the inevitable and get the server onto something more robust. We have a Redhat-based server that already runs the many Domino blogs we host, plus a test server or two. So, how to migrate?
Create a new user on Linux for the new server.
Add a new IP address onto the Linux server as an alias on the existing interface.
Run the Domino 8.5 installer again on the Linux box, setting up a new Domino instance with the same name as the old one.
Stop the Mail server, zip up the data directory and SFTP over to the Linux box.
Archive off the new data directory just in case and unzip the Mail server archive in its place. (tar -cvf mailnew.tar /domino/maildata; unzip mailcopy.zip etc)
Chown the contents of the data directory with the right Llinux user (chown -R /domino/maildata mail:domino)
Edit notes.ini for the server, changing all references to c:lotusdata… etc to /domino/maildata/…
Add the IP address to the notes.ini (TCPIP_TCPIPAddress=0,78.129.232.127)
Change the IP address for the server in the DNS
Start the server.
There we go, an entire mail server, SMTP router, LDAP server, AdminP server, web server and goodness what else, all moved to an entirely new operating system, machine and site. All in the space of 20 minutes with no hassle, no drama and no “rip and replace”. To borrow a familiar phrase, “it just worked!” 😉 Don’t you just love Lotus Domino?
