Which To Do First: NetWare Upgrade or eDirectory Upgrade

Articles and Tips: qna

01 Aug 2001

Dear Ab-end: I have a chicken-and-the-egg question. We have a tree with one server running NetWare 5.1/ NDS 8.73 and several running NetWare 4.11/4.2 with NDS 6.11. We are planning to upgrade most of the NetWare 4.x servers to NetWare 5.1 and would like to also install eDirectory 8.512.

What I am wondering is which should I do first: the NetWare upgrade or the eDirectory upgrade? Does it make a difference? If we do eDirectory first, will we have a problem installing NetWare v5.1, since it wants to install either NDS 7 or 8? -- Instigating in Illinois

Dear Instigating: I would say upgrade the NetWare OS first. This will provide a solid foundation for your network. Make certain things are stable on the OS side, then upgrade to NDS eDirectory 85.xx. In the process, NetWare Support Packs will be required. It is a good thing to give support packs time to stabilize on your network before making more changes.

As a rule of thumb, perform the following:

As always, a really thorough tree-wide backup is essential. Just in case something doesn't go as planned.
Upgrade your NetWare 4.x servers to NetWare 5.1, accepting the default NDS that ships with NetWare 5.1.
You can either install the latest NetWare 5.1 Support Pack now, or be forced to do it when you upgrade NDS to eDirectory.
Install eDirectory on all servers. It is essential that the same version of NDS be running on all your servers. Failure to do this will produce two problems: (1) You will not be able to take advantage of all the current features of the current eDirectory release; and (2) There is higher risk of synchronization problems and other possible problems when running mixed versions of NDS on the same network.
Lastly, you may want to open a call to Novell Technical Support if things don't go as planned.

* Originally published in Novell AppNotes

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