We finally had to upgrade CAREO to MacOSX 10.3 Server (it was still running 10.1.5 before that!). Over the Christmas break, we had a nearly catastrophic failure of the hard drive in the CAREO server. Not a good thing. We've got everything backed up, so I just slapped in a new 75GB drive (well, it's old - inherited from a previous project).
The installation of Panther was dead easy. Configuring WebObjects was more trouble that it needed to be (permissions on the /Library/WebObjects/Configuration directory were too strict, and the app_server user couldn't write the config there, so wotaskd bailed. not good).
The hardest part of the whole process was getting the MySQL database updated. We had been running MySQL 3.23.49 before, and Panther comes with 4.0.16 - so I couldn't just move the database files over - had to export/import the sql dumps. fun hiccoughs there - quoting field names is a Good Idea in sql dumps...)
Still some minor annoyances - MySQL doesn't want to launch at boot, so I have to manually % sudo /usr/local/mysqld_safe &. And, there are probably some minor things that didn't find their way onto the new drive before the old one completely packed up and died. I'll add them as they're noticed...
The new admin apps are waaaaaaaay nicer than before. Nice to see 7-day high water marks for network and CPU usage. Nice to be able to config just about everything from a nice handy interface. Also nice to see all servers status indicators in a single window.
Next up on the upgrade parade is the main Learning Commons webserver. It's been acting VERY flaky lately with database deadlocks all over the place. It's also running 10.1.5 and WO 5.1, so updates to the OS will bring many bug fixes...