Apple Updates 'OS X Server' With Bug Fixes

Lion Server upgrade

Has anyone upgraded from Lion Server to Mountain Lion Server?
I have always heard upgrades on the server do not normally work out.

Thoughts?

jmille44 said:

Has anyone upgraded from Lion Server to Mountain Lion Server?
I have always heard upgrades on the server do not normally work out.

Thoughts?

Click to expand...

Went from 10.5.8 Server to 10.6.3 server a few years ago. It was DNS and OD master with around 300 users. That went well.

But, I rather do a clean install and import the necessary data. If the server was as "default setup" as possible, then upgrading usually works well.

Just make sure you have fall-back strategy: make a bootable dmg of the origininal server boot-volume before upgrading.

jmille44 said:

Has anyone upgraded from Lion Server to Mountain Lion Server?
I have always heard upgrades on the server do not normally work out.

Thoughts?

Click to expand...

I just did an upgrade from Lion Server to ML Server and it went super. I did a backup just in case, but it went super no issues.

jmille44 said:

Has anyone upgraded from Lion Server to Mountain Lion Server?
I have always heard upgrades on the server do not normally work out.

Thoughts?

Click to expand...

I suspect some of what you've heard is hyperbole, and some very real. There are plenty of tales from the trenches to be found on discussions.apple.com

My recollection is that Lion to ML was fairly uneventful, and that is likely to be the case going forward, since Server has become a rather basic stand-alone management application. Earlier transitions could be far more painful - what with directory location changes, changes in underlying services software, the switch to GeneratedUIDs, the occasional Open Directory corruption, etc. Hopefully all that type of standardization that occurred along the way has arrived at a point of stability... guess we'll get a good indication in a month or so.

If possible I would always recommend installing a major OS release from scratch, but there are plenty of cases in which that's not terribly feasible.

kildjean said:

I just did an upgrade from Lion Server to ML Server and it went super. I did a backup just in case, but it went super no issues.

Click to expand...

We did the update minutes ago and things really went smooth for us. The only catch is, the NetInstall service is still not seeing the Bonded network. The server application itself is seeing the bonded ethernet network we setup. In order to use NetInstall, which we use everyday for imaging, we reverted back to a single interface for this server. Bummer....

failed for SnowLeopard to Lion, haven't looked since

I had an absolutely catastrophic update when i attempted to go from Snow Leopard to Lion:

did you know that when you update to Lion Server, it *removes* all your web sites? and PHP? That there is no longer any way to maintain virtual hosts? That even configuring them via command line is near impossible, even for a veteran unix guru?

So my Q is, is all this fixed?

Has anyone heard if apple will make us pay for an "mavericks" version of server.. Or will it be a free upgrade?

tallmichael said:

Has anyone heard if apple will make us pay for an "mavericks" version of server.. Or will it be a free upgrade?

Click to expand...

You'll most likely have to pay for it.

davecotter said:

So my Q is, is all this fixed?

Click to expand...

What I said above. Some of the previous transitions were very painful, and Snow Leopard to Lion in particular wreaked havoc. I used to dread even minor dot-release updates, but now that everything seems to have settled on /Library/Server/ as home, I've had no further significant issues.

At least for me, data files, .confs, even hand-tweaked DNS zones have all been respected the last few times through. Remember that there is now essentially no difference between OS X and OS X Server - Server's just a GUI app to things that are already there on every system - so there's no big installation process whereby things are potentially overwritten. (er, knock on wood!)

Ditched OS X Server for Server 2008 R2. I got my school to buy the ExtremeZ-IP plug-in for AFP. Runs wayyy better than OS X server did for home directories. I've had 300+ users logged into one server for home directories without a hitch. OS X server would choke at about 75 simultaneous users logged in. The only thing we use OS X server for now is profile manager 2 & it's finicky.

jmille44 said:

Has anyone upgraded from Lion Server to Mountain Lion Server?
I have always heard upgrades on the server do not normally work out.

Thoughts?

Click to expand...

SL to Lion was pretty bad for me, so I was incredibly skeptical with the update from Lion to ML. I waited for OS X 10.8.3 and Server 2.2.1 before I made the jump, and it upgraded just fine. There were a couple issues with my amavisd.conf settings not getting migrated, but I just hand edited it again to restore my settings (Server.app saved my old config file for easy reference). There were also a couple minor website issues, and I ended up just nuking my apache settings and starting fresh without any problems (I had a rather complex hand-configured apache setup, so I expected that there would be issues there).

I've since updated the OS to 10.8.4 and 10.8.5 without any issue and will be doing this Server upgrade later tonight without much worry.

Still, I think I'll wait for Mavericks 10.9.2 and Server 3.1 (or whatever the ".1" server update will be) before I migrate my server to Mavericks (just in case).

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davecotter said:

I had an absolutely catastrophic update when i attempted to go from Snow Leopard to Lion:

did you know that when you update to Lion Server, it *removes* all your web sites? and PHP? That there is no longer any way to maintain virtual hosts? That even configuring them via command line is near impossible, even for a veteran unix guru?

So my Q is, is all this fixed?

Click to expand...

Lion's Server.app was quite limited, but you still had support for virtual hosts on the system (I forget if it was exposed in Server.app or Server Admin.app on Lion). I know ML's Server.app is *MUCH* better than Lion's, and it certainly allows configuration of virtual hosts from within the app.

i will never leave snow leopard server. It was the last good server, the only downfall it has is that it uses ipfw and not pf as a firewall.

To get things like profile manager i just virtualize mountain lion in a virtualbox vm set to autostart at boot.

so how then?

so how do i upgrade to ML or Mavericks Server without going thru the catastrophe that is SL to Lion? When you go SL to Lion you lose tons of config info. i'm not into that.

?

so, nobody knows?