Anyone upgrade from Snow Leopard Server to Mountain Lion + Server.app?

I'm planning on going from Snow Leopard Server to Mountain Lion + Server.app this weekend. I don't use any features of SLS not supported in Server.app and everything else I run on it is ML compatible. The Apple website says that all I have to do is upgrade to Mountain Lion over SLS and then install Server.app.

Has anyone done this successfully? Any "gotchas"? It somehow seems too good to be true.

I'm particularly after the availability of FileVault 2 so I can encrypt the drives, but I also want to smooth the path to a new mini server if or when I decide to take the plunge.

chown33 said:

In short, have a way to revert, try it, see what happens.

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My system clones the system drives every night and I'll be doing the upgrade in the morning, so I think I'm covered!

chown33 said:

Test the clone by booting from it before embarking on the upgrade. A non-working backup is a horrible thing.

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Not only that, to make the final clone extra clean I'm going to turn off all services first. Some things don't clone well when active.

chrfr said:

Don't clone from a live disk! Depending on what the machine is doing you won't get databases copied properly.

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Yep, I did extensive testing when the system was new (3+ years ago). The cloning occurs in the middle of the night when everything is stable (this is a home environment, after all). I found the only thing that wouldn't reliably clone was the Open Directory database. But there is a separate archive command for that, and I archive it every time I make a change, which isn't that often.

As for upgrading, it depends entirely on what you're doing with the server as to how successful it'll be.

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I don't think I'm using any services for which it would be a problem. In fact I'm looking forward to turning off the Printer (overkill) and DNS services. Apparently ML+S doesn't need DNS while SLS wouldn't run without it. I want to be able to have Plex serve through our AppleTV, and there is a clever script that does this by acting like a DNS server and routing requests for trailers.apple.com (a service the ATV uses) to the server. I haven't been able to figure out a way to get the DNS service to do this (I'd think "trailers.apple.com. CNAME server.mydomain" would work, but I haven't had any success with any variation of that).

chrfr said:

No version of Open Directory, Mountain Lion included, will run without properly configured DNS. That hasn't changed between versions. The question, though, is do you really need OD for a home server? I would think not.

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Perhaps not. I could turn it off and see what happens.

chrfr said:

The question, though, is do you really need OD for a home server? I would think not.

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Thinking about this more, I'm not sure how things interact. The only login account on the server is the administrator account. All the other accounts and groups AFAIK are part of OD. Without OD I'd have to set up a login account on the server for every user, something I don't want to do.

About 8 hours after I started, everything appears to be up and running.

DNS was very hosed. So messed up I really can't list everything that was wrong. I basically had to delete all the zones and start over. And there were other networking issues I had to clear up. My server had two IP addresses and two names associated with it, and the NS record was set up nonsensically.

When I fixed that every other service I'm running sprang to life, including Open Directory.

Added -- The upgrade process created two new shares for Groups and Videos, however I already had shares of that name that weren't in the default locations, so the new shares were Groups-1 and Videos-1. I deleted them, but my Groups and Videos shares wouldn't appear. I had to delete and recreate them as well.

One day later I discovered that errors were flooding in from Calendar and Contacts because the Calendar "Enable invitations by email" was checked. I unchecked the box.

I've also encrypted all the drives (and backup drives) with sensitive material. I couldn't use FileVault 2 on the boot drive because that prevents starting up remotely. (BOO HISS!) So all sensitive info on that drive was moved off.

Everything is running smooth. 1.81GB Wired, 2.03GB Active, so it is using slightly over 4GB of the 8GB. Presumably the free space is being used for drive caching (it was used that way with SLS). CPU usage is about 10% in the middle of the night with peaks in the 60 to 90% range during the day, so this 3+ year old mini is still up to the task (at least after the RAM upgrade).