Intralink 3.4 upgrades - the future's bright...

Since my post about Intralink 3.4 upgrades back in March (can't believe it's been so long!) - we've done quite a few upgrades here... and come across a whole range of issues. I realise we may be behind the cutting-edge Intralink population, since some companies have moved to PDMLink, but I still get the feeling that many companies continue to work with 3.x ... particularly after reading some of the posts on PTC/USER (brand new layout, forums, etc - worth a look)

In the interests of public service here are a few of the common errors with suggestions & workarounds:

OSA 2.0 F000 installer - problem with Java, messages about JavaVM, etc
Ensure you have Java version 1.4.2_xx in your PATH

After failed OSA install, blank screen is shown
Remove hidden folder @ Program Files\Zero G Registry (TPI 128563)

Errors connecting to 3.4 server using company scripts
Port Intralink uses has changed between 3.3 > 3.4 - from 1524 to 1521

Dataserver M040 upgrade shows error "attempting invalid upgrade"
This has been a common error for us, even on sparkling new machines...
The only solution to work for us was pretty brutal:

• Find working 3.4 server to act as DONOR (thankfully some of the upgrades worked!)
• dbshut both databases + zip DONOR dataserver folder (excluding .dbf files)
  
• Copy to the PATIENT server
• Move the dbf files to safe place
  
• Unzip to dataserver folder, re-instate dbf files
• Edit .ora files, to ensure they mention correct dataserver name
  
• Do some selective registry hacking, replacing M012 with M040
• dbstart databases and hold your breath...

All in all, this upgrade can be a hard road to travel - you're lucky if you only need to do it once, and by some miracle it works first time... You're in trouble if you come across issues, or have to repeat the process for different servers. In the original post I mentioned 8 production servers, there's 14 to do, with 5 already completed by our lovely in-house CAD people :-)

Along the way, I've been learning SQLPlus commands on the side, and this has come in handy for server clean-up, etc... I'll do an article about this sometime soon.