Upgrading headless XServe G5 from 10.3 to 10.4

[hmueller]

Greetings All,

I wanted to see if some wiser heads could coment on my current plan for upgrading my G5 Xserve to 10.4.X from 10.3.9.

Currently my XServe is in a data center several hundred miles away from where I now live and I haven’t physically seen it in close to 2 years and have had little need to do so.

I finally gotten to the point where I must upgrade to OS X Server 10.4 to take advantage of some of the features my users are requesting, i.e. jabber, mail scanning, server side spam filtering, among others.

I will be at the data center this coming weekend and tonight realized that I have never upgraded a headless server before, all my previous servers were in my office and had monitors attached. After looking around I have come up with what I think my two possibilities are and I wanted some comments and confirmation that I am on the right track.

OPTION 1:

1. Reboot the Xserve into Target Disk Mode and mount it on my laptop.
2. Run the installer directly from my laptop on the mounted drive.
3. When the installer is finished reboot the Xserve and attempt to connect to is using the Server Assistant.app to enter the new serial number and do any additional configuration.
4. Reboot again and (hopefully) things will startup as they are supposed to and I can recheck the configuration of my services.
OPTION 2:

1. Start the Xserve from the installation DVD
2. Connect to the XServe using Server Assistant
3. Follow the instructions from Server Assistant to install the new system software
4. Use Server Assistant to enter the required configuration data
5. Reboot and hope that everything went as intended.

Honestly both of these options seem much too easy and straightforward. Am I in the ball park here? Are these the two best options? Is one better than the other?

What about networking? Do I need to configure networking in a particular way for the Server Assistant to see the XServe when it is either booted from the installation DVD or in TDM? How about on the laptop that will be running Server Assistant?

I am feeling quite a bit of anxiety about this upgrade at the moment as I will only have a few hours to accomplish the whole operation before having to leave the data center for other tasks that need to be completed. Any suggestions, reassurance, dope slaps, etc. would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Harry

[Author]

Posts