Although usually I prefer to make a clean installation of a new OS to lose all the junk accumulated since last OS upgrade, this time I decided to upgrade our family Media Center box instead, because unlike my desktop the MCE box has just a few basic server apps, like IIS, email server, ORB, WebGuide, and of course MCE 2005.
Overall, upgrade was a success, but most of the drivers and applications had to be either upgraded or reinstalled. There were quite a few things to take care of:
- Running Vista Upgrade Advisor was a good idea. It tells upfront which drivers, services and application will not, or may not work. The most important thing it told me was that I don't have enough space on drive C:, so since it was still an XP I used Norton Partition Magic to increased the C: partition size by 25 GB. I also downloaded some Vista drivers before starting the upgrade just in case my network card would not work after the upgrade.
- Although ATI Catalyst software was not among those Vista Upgrade Advisor suggested to remove, the screen resolution settings were not preserved by the upgrade process. Moreover, standard MS ATI driver didn't support resolutions required by some HDTV sets. I had to visit ATI web site and download the latest driver and the Catalyst software. Once I've done that I was able to adjust the resolution back to what it used to be.
- MCE settings partially survived. Scheduled series settings carried over fine, but Signal settings and Guide had to be specified again by going through the setup wizard. I had my recorded TV shows location in XP MCE changed from the default. While new MCE in Vista has found them, I still had to specified the location for new recordings. Thankfully, it was easy - the UI allowing to change the location of newly recorded shows is built into Vista's MCE app. Pictures and Music location settings have carried over with no problem.
- The hardest part was to revive ASP.NET applications and sites after IIS was upgraded from IIS5 on XP to IIS 7.0 on Vista. The hardest problem was that caused by the remnants of some old version of .NET Framework 2.0. That caused application pools hosting .NET 2.0 to crash hard on the very first request while spitting out strange errors, like "The worker process failed to pre-load .Net Runtime version v2.0." to the application log. It took me two days of Internet searching to find the solution.
ASP.NET 1.1 applications were also all not working. I had to run aspnet_regiis.exe from the 1.1 Framework to bring them back to life.
In many cases I had to manually ACL folders containing ASP.NET applications with access rights for "NETWORK SERVICE" user account. I also had to change anonymous authentication account from IUSR_whatever to appPool identity.
The bottom line is migration of ASP.NET web apps was not trivial.
- Both Orb and WebGuide stopped working after the upgrade. I upgraded ORB with no problem and uninstalled the WebGuide so I could install Vista-specific version of the WG. It all went fine - that's after I was done fixing all the IIS7 glitches.
- dasBlog 1.9 - the software running this blog - ended up being incompatible with Vista. I had to move this blog to another server running good ole' Windows 2003/IIS 6.0. After moving the app to another server, which was free of surprises, the final challenge was to redirect links going to old blog location pointing to IIS7/Vista to the new one. Unlike IIS6, IIS7 does not have a UI where you could choose "A redirection to a URL" as a destination for your virtual directory. Redirection in IIS7 can be done but it requires running a command-line utility. Fortunately that worked.
- Unlike IIS, UltiDev Cassini Web Server underpinning WebGuide4 went through upgrade precess as smooth as it can be.