Lion Server Testing Report

Today was the beginning of testing a Lion Server upgrade on the production network at North Mahaska Schools. After school, we shutdown the current Snow Leopard production server called x1 and at the same time started up our identical test server (our cloned x1 server upgraded to Lion Server).

The DHCP began to populate clients almost immediately as the DHCP lease is only 1 hour. We took remote control of some iMacs in a lab setting and tested logins for several accounts, which seemed to work flawlessly. I tried a MacBook Air 11.6" unit and also tested login on the wireless network. I was able to surf the Internet almost immediately. We opened, editing and saved documents to the server with our home directories (x2 and x3).

Then we had a phone call 10 minutes into the test from a teacher using her laptop that she could not get to any websites. Sure enough, there was some glitch with DNS the proved to be causing her laptop to not do domain name resolution. We tried renewing the DHCP lease manually on both wireless and wired connections, but DNS seemed to be non operational. The laptop, a MacBook Pro, was getting its settings correctly from the DHCP server.

Since DHCP was providing the DNS information, we updated that setting to include our two outside DNS providers in addition to the internal DNS server setting. Usually, our internal DNS would provide forwarders to the outside DNS servers. Once the additional DNS servers were pushed to the DHCP client on the MacBook Pro, the Internet worked perfectly.

The oddity of the problem of one machine struggling to get DNS while other iMacs and MacBooks worked fine seems to me an issue of caching DNS entries on the MacBook Pro itself in this case. Of course switching the OS X server that provides authentication, DNS, DHCP, and points users to their home directories on other OS X servers is not common practice in mid-stream. However, with one issue and all others computer users seemingly functioning through the transition from old production to new test server, I am pleased with the results of the test.

Tomorrow is a light day at school and the plan is to test the server for the remainder of the day, prior to committing to upgrading the production server from Snow Leopard Server to Lion Server. If that process goes well, then we will backup the x2 server with its XRAID unit attached and do a Lion Server upgrade on it later in the week. This process will be different as we do not have a spare Mac Pro to test. So you might wonder what is the plan in this case. Stay tuned and let me know if you wish to hear more about the testing process I have in mind for x2.