Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

This week I ran into an interesting situation attempting to upgrade a secondary domain to GroupWise 2014.  Well, in reality I had no problem upgrading the domain.  It upgraded perfectly.  I simply could not get the admin service to configure and launch.  We actually ran the system this way for a few days, with the domain and post office upgraded, and users happily accessing the post office with the GroupWise 2014 client and GroupWise 2014 WebAccess while I tried to ferret out the issue (thanks to some smart people at Novell!)  I could manage the system just fine from the primary domain, so I just took a deep breath and patiently waited for Novell to figure out what was up.  What was clear was that each time I would click “finish” on the installation/upgrade screen, the admin service would crash and create a core file, but we were getting no useful information in any logs.

If you’ve read our Upgrade Guide for GroupWise 2014, we mention a few times that the admin service seems very particular about having everything “just so” in your GroupWise system.  In our “moving” guide for GroupWise 2014, we have you edit the path to the domain in ConsoleOne before you move the domain to the new server.  On an in-place upgrade (such as the one I was working on), one would assume there would be nothing to modify.  However, it seems I ran up against an issue where the domain location in the wpdomain.db file was not the same location in my gwha.conf file.  The wpdomain.db file has values for both UNC and Linux settings.  My Linux setting was set to:

The mta file for my domain listed in the gwha.conf pointed to

If you’ve been around here awhile, you will recall a blog post I wrote on how to configure ConsoleOne to allow you to manage GroupWise on Linux properly both from a Windows workstation, and from ConsoleOne directly on Linux.  In this particular instance, this is why the upgrade was failing.  To refresh your memory on why you might end up with paths similar to the above, check it out here:

Administering Your Linux GroupWise Domain from Linux and Windows

It was easy enough to fix.  I reinstalled the ConsoleOne snapins on my Linux server (they get removed during the GroupWise 2014 installation), edited the location of the domain to the true path, and not the mount point path, and reran the upgrade procedure.

Note, I still had an odd issue with a blank error message popping up at the end of the upgrade configuration process, and the admin service would not restart automatically.  Since there were no errors in the admin service log, and the service had not crashed, I simply restarted the service manually, and voilà!  Everything was configured properly.

Hopefully this will help someone else out there from getting “stuck” in this process!