I’ve upgraded a LOT of Domino servers in my time, and so yesterday when I upgraded another one (Windows 2003) to Domino 8.5.1 I was expecting another smooth ride. After running the install wizard it informed me that the computer needed to be restarted – interesting, as I don’t recall needing to do a Windows restart for previous upgrades, but who am I to argue?

As the box was coming back up it locked up at “Applying Computer Settings”, meaning logging in via console or RDP was unavailable. It took me a minute to realise what had happened – the Domino Service had automatically started and it was sitting there asking if I wanted to upgrade the address book’s template. It took a little while to realise what was going on as I’ve never needed to restart Windows after a Domino upgrade so I’d never seen this happen before! A simple boot into safe mode to set the service to Manual followed by a reboot and a manual start of the Domino server and all was well.

I am interested as to why this box needed to be rebooted, when others I’ve upgraded haven’t. My only theory is that it had a hotfix applied to it and perhaps there’s something in that which needed a reboot, however I really am guessing there.

Tags: IBM, Notes, Domino