Hi all!
My library system is hosted and migrated from AWS to ExLibris servers on 2/27/23.
The process was not smooth and there are a handful of things we found that might make your transition a little bit less painless.
- There’s a registry change that you should push via GPO (or manually if you’re a smaller org) to all of your machines before you install the new Polaris remoteapp
– You can make the change now so you don’t have to worry about it later
– If you’d like the specifics of our GPO, let me know and I can provide that
– To do it manually:
— From an Admin command line, run the following and then restart the machine:
— reg add “HKLM\software\policies\microsoft\windows nt\Terminal Services\Client” /v fClientDisableUDP /d 1 /t REG_DWORD - Test installing the new remoteapp well ahead of time
– We found that Polaris provided the wrong remoteapp installer
– Once we had the right installer, a Polaris firewall change was required before the new remoteapp would work - If you use telephony, you’ll need to update the IP on your SIP/phone server to your new IP and open up outbound traffic on port 1433 in your firewall
- After the migration, make sure your offline page (yourlibrary.polarislibrary.com/offline) has been established and is behind a login page that requires credentials
- If you have automatic MDB download setup, it will continue to work after the migration, without any changes, as long as your offline page is established
- Make sure all your Polaris remote apps (user management, SQL management studio, bulk change logs, Express Check, email manager logs, etc) have been established
- After the migration we found that we had to give all terminal server users who need to make bulk changes access to the bulk change logs remoteapp
– If they don’t have access to that app, they’ll still be able to perform bulk changes (with a little bit of extra clicking around) but they’ll be unable to generate a bulk change error log which is problematic - Verify that your connections to LC authority updates/ZMarc imports are setup
- Make sure the SQL server agent is running
- You will probably have to change the time your notices start sending
– After migration our notifications started sending at 6 AM - Be ready to not have reliable printing
– There’s a known issue with ScrewDrivers (Polaris has a ticket open with Tricerat about it) that causes printers to not “stick” after being set, so staff have to set the printers in each window each morning
– Sometimes the printers don’t show up at all and the troubleshooting steps Polaris offers are hit-or-miss
– We still have libraries who cannot print any labels - Don’t expect that Polaris will be paying extra attention to your organization’s tickets or looking out for potential issues
- Make sure you’re opening tickets with the proper urgency
– November News from PIAC - When you go live after the migration, if you’re experiencing slowness, immediately request more resources on your terminal server
– We were up and down and freezing and staff were getting booted out of the remoteapp for days because Polaris didn’t provision enough resources and they ended up having to add a second terminal server to load balance the number of connections we have
If you have any questions about my list or anything else migration related, I’m happy to provide more information/insight where I can!
Hopefully some of this information can be helpful to other libraries who are preparing to make the move.
Thank you!