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Renaming Every Server In A Laserfiche Server Farm

posted on November 14, 2023 Show version history

Has anyone ever had to rename every server in their Laserfiche server farm before? We have a new system administrator and one of his goals for 2024 to adopt a uniform server naming convention across the entire domain which we will have to comply with. If we were a small shop it wouldn't be such a big deal but between our DEV and PROD tiers we're talking 26 servers total. At a glance it seems like it would take 100s of hours to pull this off with significant downtime for our customers who are state government agencies that use us to host their Laserfiche enivronments.

Given the number of Forms and Workflows we have I know there's a huge number of connection profiles and data sources that would need to be changed and every service task that calls a workflow in a business process would have to be updated as well. And that's probably just the tip of the iceberg. I get that DNS aliasing can help smooth out the transition some but I'm not sure how much since there are SSL certs to consider.

I'm thinking it might make more sense to just duplicate the environment and then move each customer one at a time. There's a lot of time (and money) involved in doing that as well.

Does anyone have any thoughts they could offer? We are just trying to feel out what the process might look like at the moment. Thanks!

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replied on November 14, 2023

SSL certs can have an Subject Alternative Name field that means that clients can continue to use the old name during a transition period. (See this recent question) I think you'll need that trick or one like it in order to avoid downtime - otherwise you need to coordinate both ends of every change.

Has your admin provided any guidance on how this should be done? The details of what need to be changed is specific to Laserfiche, but I would think there would be a general strategy that you could follow.

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replied on November 14, 2023

Thanks Brian! Yeah, as you may have figured out I'm just the guy who does the Laserfiche stuff, not the guy who manages the servers. No guidance from the admin yet but I will likely have to provide assistance to them in developing the plan to do this.

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replied on November 15, 2023

You would want to also put in redirects in WF. Maybe add the old names for the hosts files so they can find each other afterwards for whatever may still be referencing the old names. Or DNS alias them to the old name. You may still have to re-do every data source, web service connection, mail server connection or network share.

Generally, it may be safer to make this a forward looking rule and let the old name die as you're replacing the servers.

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