Upgrading to Domino 6.5 – Went off (almost) without a hitch…

I have a Domino environment that consists of three Domino servers and a Domino/Sametime server.  This past weekend we upgraded all the servers from Domino 5.0.12 to 6.5.  Left Sametime at 5.0.12 because I wasn’t convinced that upgrading it would work.  So I held off.  Everything went very well, except I totally forgot about one gotcha that took me awhile to fix later.

Basically one server was set up to use IIS as its HTTP stack.  Well, 6.X uses a WAS Plugin to take care of it instead.  So, just doing the upgrade broke access to .NSF’s via a browser.  Ugh, totally forgot about checking on that and it’s NOT listed as something to look for in the upgrade red and yellow books.  Anyway, I looked through the redbook and followed directions, and GASP, it didn’t work.  Granted, it was a redbook that I got last Lotusphere, so it was a little out of date.

Anyway, I headed to notes.net (it will ALWAYS be Notes.net to me) and started searching.  Looks like I wasn’t the only one perplexed.  The documentation in the redbook WAS actually wrong.  After searching a while, I found the proper syntax and finally got everything up and running.  Now this isn’t a trivial task.  You need to copy the websphere plugin files to directories you first have to create on the server.  You also need to edit the registry and add some info.  You then need to set up an XML config file correctly, and THEN you need to add the proper virtual directories and ISAPI filters to IIS.  Whew… what a lot of work to use a sucky web server.

Anyway, I wanted to share this info for anyone getting ready to upgrade.  Make sure you have the right info before you go in to the IIS configs.  It will save you a ton of time.