Parallel Server ??

[mlbasso]

I have a single server at my High School location. It holds all student and teacher accounts and home directories. I need to upgrade to ver6 and onto newer hardware. I have the second, new computer waiting to go. I want to do this the safest way, not to have any down-time (I can not wait until shool ends this summer for a variety of reasons). I hoped to install the new server from scratch, while keeping the original server live. Ideally I would like to configure and copy all data to the new server and simply shutdown the old server and the new server will take over. Is this possible? Someone told me I should use the server migration tools provided by Novell. But that would require down-time. If I had to I guess I could do that over a weekend. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[marvhuffaker]

In my opinion, the safest way is to install the new server into the tree, get it setup correctly and how you need it.

Then migrate the data from the old server to new server, change login scripts and rights, etc. Server Consolidation Utility will help you with some of this.

There is also a utility called Beyond Compare (

http://www.download.com)

that is a must have to make sure you have all the data copied to the new location correctly. I use it all the time.

Once you get everything moved over to the new server, then you can remove the old server from the tree. Or you can leave it in and just use it as a replica for redundancy of NDS since it sounds like you only have one server in your tree.

Marvin Huffaker MCNE, CNE
Marvin Huffaker Consulting

http://www.redjuju.com