Hi Guys,
We intent to upgrade our old server hardware (as well as OS WinServer2003) within the next time to the current MS Server 2016 edition. That's why I'm presently collecting all necessary steps to move the services to their new place of residence, including Mercury, which is presently running fine in v4.80.149, and Pmail, running in v4.72572 german edition.
I have already searched for "Moving Mercury" in the forums, but most of the results are years old or do not describe the process completely. Also the Mercury Manual (I hold the manual Mercury/32 v4.51) describes only the installing and the automatic start by Mercury/32Loader.
I'm aware that Mercury is file based and that I can take the present Mercury subfolder structure (which also contains all Pmail user mailboxes) as it is, and move it to the new server, provided the folder structure is not being changed. So far so good. But now what I'm thinking about:
1. Since the new v5 is not released by David I have to create a Service which starts Mercury automatically on reboot of the machine. On our old 2003 Server I have different skeletons in the cupboard, means in the service administration of Windows Server, where I have tested different freeware service creation tools. At the end one tool works fine and the other bad tries are disabled since years. Is it also with WinServer2016 still the best way to install a 3rd party service creation tool to create a Mercury Service? What are your experiences and could anybody recommend a procedure or tool for automatic Mercury start?
2. Don't know whether my following exposition is completely correct, but there is also still the issue with the GUI in the different sessions or desktops. When Mercury is automatically started and I'm locally logged-on at the server, I could see the GUI of Mercury. But when connected via RDP (with the same user account data) the Mercury GUI is disappeard. This is well known and as far as I know also this behaviour should be improved with the new v5.
But because 95% of my log-ons are being carried out via RDP, I stop and kill the "local" Mercury process and restart the service manually when logged-in via RDP for the first time after reboot. From then, the GUI is always available at all RDP sessions, irrespective from which machine I access to.
Has anybody in the meantime a better practical solution for getting acces to the GUI from any log-ons?
3. Our server will get a new server name and IP address. Mercury is not configured as our MX server. It is only relay server. Incoming mails will be collected by Mercury-D via POP3 regularly from our ISP mail server and all outgoing mails are being sent by Mercury-C to the ISP mail server. Do I have to change any Mercury configs? And I think I have to change the path to the mailbox directory of Pmail, isn't it?
Hope anybody has some recommendations or own experiences in in this regard so that I can save some try and error cycles ;-)
Cheers
Joerg