Rebuilding Domino 8.5 server

David Clover  22 January 2009 04:43:58 PM

 A couple of nights ago, I rebuilt our new Domino 8.5 server from scratch - not just for fun, but because for some reason, it had encountered an instability that kept taking it offline. We've upgraded this step by step since Domino 4.5 in 1997 and it's never given any trouble through 11 years of the upgrades. So this was untypical to say the least.

After much head scratching and looking at the NSD failure logs (very detailed and useful - thanks IBM and for the speedy resopnse to the PMR which I raised at 3:30am) it transpired that an email being collected from the server by the IMAP protocol had badly formed MIME content and this was causing IMAP and related routing processes to fail.

But the good part was that after saving the critical configuration  files - notes.ini, server and cert ID files and the 'names' file and saving the data directory, I was able to strip the 11 year old installation completely (including all the junk and Registry entries that had accumulated since 1997 when we first had Domino 4.5), I ran the 8.5 installer and hotfix, added Traveler 8.5, replaced the config files and data dirctory - and we had a fully operational server again that looked like it had never been away.

All I need to know now of course is where the corrupted email came from - and hope that the detail in the PMR will allow IBM to respond to and trap the problem in the next build of 8.5.

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