Aside from a mistake I made trying to upgrade the OS of a remote server, there were a few problems with the upgrade. I've scoured the interwebs in search for people who have had — and hopefully resolved — similar problems; I've found several who have had similar problems, but the resolution for each was to restore a backup and wait until the bigs were ironed out.

After the upgrade, I was able to login using my admin account without issues. When checking out the new Server.app, which replaced Server Admin.app, I noticed that ALL user accounts and groups were gone. Poof. Vanished.

For those of you who don't know, user accounts -say, peter, for example — are actually stored as really long ID numbers. That way, you can change the name of the account, but you the ID is always the same. So you may login using your easy-to-remember account name, but the computer only knows you as that huge ID.

In other words, if I add back an account called peter, it may appear to be corrected, but all those permissions I defined for file sharing still refer to the old ID, not the new one. Thus, the account peter may as well be called kongyifan.

Because I really didn't want to restore from a backup, I checked through all the file shares and noticed that, really, no one stored anything anywhere except me. I guess you guys like reading my stuff and not really storing your own. Which is no problem by me. That made it far easier to restore without actually restoring. I moved a handful of files, mostly in the public directory, back and redefined the permissions. For an organization as small as this one, brute force is often the quickest way to do things — if this were a bigger organization, however, I'd be pretty upset with Apple, and would have been forced to restore from the backup I made just before the upgrade.

I'm finding a few other annoyances with OS X Lion Server that were no problem on Snow Leopard Server. Namely, I can't yet find a way to define who has what access to what services. For example, previously I was able to define exactly who had VPN access. Now I can either turn VPN on or off, and that's it. I'm not really okay with that and am searching for solutions. File permissions are more conducted in the OS than in the Server administration app, which I also don't much care for. I don't want to need to find files in the Finder and change the permissions by pressing cmd-i and manually changing it — nor do I want to run a whole bunch of unix commands to chmod or chown.

If I come across any other big changes, I'll be sure to post here. For now, I'm considering this both a good learning opportunity for myself, and also a good opportunity to clean up the good learning opportunities I had back in Snow Leopard. We'll see how it goes from here.