Techno Maging - The Full Story
"When called by a panther, don't anther" - Ogden Nash
Maybe I should have listened. As wonderful as the new Panther operating system is for macs, the server version should come with a big warning label that says "Caution - This Product Could Blow Away All Of Your Server Configurations - Leading to heart palpitations, dangerous behavior, and sleep disorders."
The plan - replace ancient G3 server technology with a nice G4. Implementation was to include a low, careful progression of steps, mapping out exactly where things should be, carefully copying things from one machine to another, leaving the G3 in place until completion, testing each piece as I went along, etc. I prepared the G4 by putting in SCSI cards so I could add tape backup, replacing one of the hard drives to a much bigger one, adding some memory, and basically making it a kick ass server. Then I read that Panther Server has a wonderful new feature that allows you to export all of your server settings in one fell swoop. Well gee, I thought....why not upgrade the G3 to panther, then export all of the settings to the G4. What a time saver! Yeah, great idea.
Except for one thing.....upgrading to Panther caused EVERYTHING to stop working. Everything. All virtual hosts were gone. All server administration settings were gone. Attempting to connect to the administration functions failed. Attempting to rebuild the virtual hosts in the web server configurations would not save, and gave a strange dialog box about bugs I should report to Apple. This was all, obviously, not good joss.
After planning ritual sepiku, a much more rational friend told me that perhaps I should just restore the boot disk from the backup I had made the week before. Wow, what a concept! :-) So I prepared to do this by installing a new bootable version of the operating system on another disk, which I would then tell the machine was the boot disk, so I could wipe the original boot disk and bring it up via restore. Well, that didn't work either. Try as I might, the machine outright refused to boot off of any other disk but the boot disk or the CD for the OS, which immediately wants you to install the new OS. I was too tired to fight with it anymore, and was about to just toss it all out the window, when I figured, why not check the G4 and see if it behaves in a rational manner. After all, I could just move most of the files over there in one fell swoop, and cross my fingers, cast a few spells, and see if it works.
It did work. After a few fits and starts, and the time ticking closer and closer to dawn when I turn into a pumpkin, I actually seem to have gotten most things to work. I'm sure it will need some tweaks, and the slow careful configuration I wanted to do is history, but things I think MOSTLY work. Once I wake up, maybe a few more spells will be in order.