Pointing a Notes Client to a new Server Name and IP address

> No other details will change...
As if this isn't enough, it's a major change.

First a question: is it a revolution or an evolution? Meaning: are you going to switch one server off and the other on within 20 seconds, or will there be some time (days, weeks) that both servers run concurrently? The first won't work, but in the second case you can move mailboxes from one server to the other using the Admin client.

Make sure that the new server is used by its DNS name, so that a Connection document with that DNS name used as address will continue to work if you change the IP-address itself.

Thanks for your reply.

Background to this is as follows:

Server A has serious hardware issues on the array controller.  Its old and I want to bin it.  Just to complicate things, In the middle of all this we are building a completely new and separate network (ip's, MS AD etc - although no changes to the email domain) Our planned was at some point to move the Notes box on to this new environment or kill and replace.  However, with the current problems we have to find a solution ASAP.

Therefore, I was going to ghost Server A onto a new box, change the name and ip and join the new MS domain.  I would add DNS entries for the old Sever name etc to point to the new ip.

My thinking was that the Lotus Server would happly run on the new box on the  new network. (We did some demo testing which appeared to support this theory).  The next issue would be the clients.  Routing is setup between the old and new network.  I thought if I changed something like the notes.ini on the clients machines to point to the new box everything would be ok - hence the question.

Hope this answers your question.  I suppose my next question is, will this work, if not why?

Onace again, many thanks for your help.

IM

> Therefore, I was going to ghost Server A onto a new box ...
Excellent idea.

> ... change the name and ip ...
No need to do that, if you completely replace the old box

> ... and join the new MS domain.  
That's a different story.

> My thinking was that the Lotus Server would happily run on the new box
Correct.

It is entirely possible to
- install a new Domino server on new hardware (VM??),
- don't set it up!
- shut down the old Domino server,
- copy the whole data directory from the old server to the new one (overwriting everything),
- shut down the old server completely,
- give the new server the old IP-address
- and then start the Domino server.

Users will only notice the down time (ans hopefully a faster response from the server).

If you want to change the IP-address, that's not so simple. Here's IBM's opinion:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21102494

And some more info:
http://searchdomino.techtarget.com/expert/KnowledgebaseAnswer/0,289625,sid4_gci942078,00.html

Maybe it's better you do this in 2 steps: first the new hardware, and later the IP-address move?

Hi,

Just to let you know.  It works perfectly well on the new domain with a different IP address.  You don't even have to change the clients notes.ini file.  As long as you have a DNS entry for the lotus domain name pointing to the new ip address.

So far, I have not found any issues, problems or errors.  Can you think of anything I could do to push the system and prove whether it has been successful, as I have ran out of things to try.

Thanks for your help.

IM

No, however we have no mobile workers, so it should be ok.

Thank for all your help.

IM