Sunday, October 4, 2015

Jumping over hurdles to upgrade Domino

Here’s what I had to do to the other day to apply Interim Fix 2 to a Domino server running version 9.0.1 Fixpack 4: Shut down Domino, the Domino Controller, the Java Console, NSD, and (wait for it, wait for it) Windows Management Instrumentation. Huh? Apparently WMI or one of its dependent apps grabs onto one or more Domino DLLs and won’t let go. Or some damn thing. One of the dependent apps was VMware Helper. I wonder if that was the culprit.  I remember running into a similar problem years ago upgrading Domino on a Xen VM. That might explain why one only sees problems like this occasionally (when least welcome, of course).
Anyway, until I stopped the WMI service, I kept getting this error when I tried to apply IF2:  “Notes/Domino related process is still running”. Thanks to Rainer Brandl for that tip.
This morning, I tried the same thing on another Domino server and it didn’t work. Same error message. More research. Thanks to Daniel Nashed for the following workaround:
Set Domino and NSD to Manual in Windows Services, rename the Domino directory, restart Windows, rename the Domino directory back to original, apply the patch, reset the services to automatic, restart NSD and Domino. 
Daniel didn’t actually say anything about resetting the Windows services. That was my own “belt-and-suspenders” add-on. Don’t know if it was really necessary. But I got past the error message. Finally. 
But IF2 still wouldn’t install because blah blah blah. Look at the UPGRADE.LOG. Wrong version of something in the Domino directory. I suspected I may have failed to notice if IF1 was installed on this server. So I ran the IF1 installer, which offered to uninstall IF1, and then did so. Then I succeeded, finally, in installing IF2. 
Had that not worked, I might have tried these other things: 
  • Run the Fixpack 4 installer. See what it says. Depending on what it says, maybe uninstall/reinstall it, then try to install IF2 again.
  • Run the 9.0.1 installer in Repair mode. Then reinstall FP4 and IF2.
  • Uninstall 9.0.1, strip everything from the Program directory, reinstall all.
Luckily I didn’t have to get that radical. 
I love working on Sunday mornings.