Troubleshooting steps when migrating from Sametime 11.5 Pre-Release to Premium

Hello all,

Right after the release of Sametime 11.5 Premium, I was eager to upgrade our Sametime environment from the Pre-Release environment to the Premium Release.

At first sight it went very well to do the upgrades but after some testing I realized there were some issues. For instance, when we loaded the Sametime Web client, the client kept on loading without showing any information.

After logging in in the Sametime mobile client, no chat contacts were visible.

In the Sametime meetings interface, I was able to log in but when I wanted to create a new Sametime meeting Room with a password, nothing happened when I clicked on the button START or when I wanted to Save & Copy the meeting link.

So there was clearly an issue with the link to MongoDB…a new feature in the Sametime meetings Premium version. Together with HCL Support we looked into the issue and found out what was going on.

These were the steps we followed to get some debugging information from the configuration

Sametime Proxy Server

Open the  “logging.properties” file located in the “conf” subfolder.

Uncomment the following lines:

com.ibm.level=FINE

com.ibm.handlers = 2localhost.org.apache.juli.AsyncFileHandler

Take a backup and remove all the files under the “Log” folder and restart the Sametime Proxy Server  and check in the logfiles what’s happening when you logged in again in the webclient.

Sametime Community Server

Open the sametime.ini and locate the [debug] section

Add the following entry to get detailed logging: VP_TRACE_ALL=1

Take a backup and remove all the files from below two folders:

Trace

IBM_TECHNICAL_SUPPORT

Restart the Community Server and reproduce the issue.

Run stdiag to collect the logs in a zip file

For Windows => Domino\stdiagzip.bat For Linux => /local/notesdata> sh stdiagzip.sh

After inspection of the resulted logfiles, HCL Support saw the following issue:

WARNING [Chuck the postman’s dispatching thread.1] com.ibm.rtc.stproxy.cluster.ClusterManager.serverLoggedOut CLFRX0002W: Sametime Proxy server is disconnected from the server on host CN=SAMETIME/O=GW-SRV with the error 80000224.

WARNING [Chuck the postman’s dispatching thread.1] com.ibm.rtc.stproxy.cluster.ServerLogin.loggedOut CLFRX0011W: Unable to log in to the Sametime community server CN=SAMETIME/O=GW-SRV. Error message is 80000224

So it seemed that the Sametime Proxy could not connect to the Community Server.

I checked the Sametime.ini file and the correct Organization was mentioned at the line

[ST_ORG_NAME=GW-SRV]

There is an LTPAToken created for SSO between the mail server and the community Server to get Sametime integration in Verse.

In the [AuthToken] section of the sametime.ini I checked the presence of the correct value

ST_TOKEN_TYPE=LTPAToken

I also checked if the IP Address of the Proxy Server was added in the stconfig.nsf database.

“Community Trusted IPS” under community connectivity.

After restart of the Domino Community Server and the Sametime Proxy server, the issue in the web and the mobile client was still present.

HCL Support suggested the following changes:

In the stproxyconfig.xml update the token domain.

<tokenDomain>groupwave.be</tokenDomain>

… </configuration>

In the chatlogging.ini, update the MongoDB user name & password

CL_MONGO_USER=

CL_MONGO_PASSWORD=

To make sure that the correct credentials are used to connect to the MongoDB

Once done, restart both the community & proxy server.

After restart, the issue was still there. Damn !

In the logs we saw that there was an issue with convomap on the Sametime Community Server. It kept on crashing because it failed to to find the class path for convomap. In the stconvomap log we saw the following:

201202_153746.704,INF,JL ,trying to create JVM

201202_153746.933,INF,JL ,JVM created OK

201202_153746.999,INF,JL ,JVMBridge::getMain: Cannot find main class, class name = com/hcl/sametime/convomap/sa/STConvoMapSA

201202_153746.999,INF,JL ,JVMBridge#loadJVM: Error getting main class, aborting… 201202_153746.999,INF,JL ,JLaunch Terminated

So maybe there was something wrong with the ConvoMapSA.jar file ?

I copied over the ConvoMapSA.jar file from another installation and restarted the Community Server and the proxy server….Tadaa !! Problem solved !

Hold on, can we now create a Sametime Meeting Room ??? Damn, still an issue there….

After checking the logs of the meeting server we saw that there was an issue to reach the MongoDB server which is new in Sametime 11.5 Premium. In the Pre-Release there was no dependency to MongoDB to be able to create a new meeting.

HCL Support suggested to adapt the docker-compose.yml file to include the following in the Catalog section

extra_hosts:

– “FQDN of your proxy server:IP Address”

– “FQDN of your mongodb server:IP Address”

When you do this you need to take the following steps to reconfigure the Sametime Meeting server

docker-compose down

take a backup of the ‘jitsi-config’ directory if you have your own certificate stored in /web/keys

delete the ‘jitsi-config’ directory

docker-compose up -d

After this change, all issues were resolved and since then we can create moderated, password-protected meetings from browser and mobile client.

I want to give a big thank you to the HCL Support Team who was very reactive and due to the screen takeover we could look together to the issue. Big Thanks !

Think2019 – It’s a recap

Last week, I attended #Think2019, to get an update on what’s coming up for Notes/Domino and the rest of the Collaboration Family Software. We have seen a lot of exciting news and may say that the future of Notes/Domino is bright and promising !

Last year they released Domino V10 on the 10th of October during a world premiere that was attended by a large group of people, both online and at the worldwide events itself. Since this launch, they released V10.0.1, the AppDev Pack, Domino Query Language (DQL), Domino mobile apps on iPad and now preparing for V11.

On tuesday, I attended ICS Collaboration day that was kicked off with the following true story…

Video

Luis Guirigay spoiled us with a fantastic demo where he showed the integration of Domino Applications in Office365 by taking advantage of the Domino AppDev Pack and the use of Node.JS and Node-Red.

In the video at the right, you can see how notifications can be send to MS Teams, Slack etc and how you can use an Alexa echo speaker to interact with your Domino Server as a user to approve requests or as an Administrator to monitor your server.

DQL Explorer

One of the main new features that they’ve released with V10, was Domino Query Language (DQL).

Video

Domino Query Language (DQL) is a facility running in Domino core allowing for a terse shorthand syntax for finding documents according to a wide variety of complexity of terms.

In the video at the left, you can see a demo of the new DQL Explorer which allows for a business user to easily create his own queries to retrieve data and export to csv for example.

The Beat Goes On !

This year they will release V11 with a focus on the UI and the speed of the client.

Video

The integration with Active Directory will be tighter so that synchronisation of data between the Domino Directory and Active Directory will be simplified.

Sametime will have a refreshed backend and frontend with persistent chat across all clients.

In the video at the right, you can see the session we attended about what’s coming up this year.

 

I also attended a session about Verse and Verse On Premise where they mentionned that more and more the features of iNotes will pop up in the Verse client. This is a clear sign that customers that use iNotes slowly may start looking at Verse as there next browser-based mail client.

As you can see, there is a lot happening in the world of Notes/Domino, and this is only the beginning.

On the 14th of March, you will have the opportunity to get to see a sneak peek of the new V11 client. Register for this webcast by filling in the registration form

 

 

Domino V11 Jam – Report

Last week there was the Domino V11 Jam, one of the ten global sessions organized, and the decision was made to organize also a session in Brussels.

With about 24 people we gathered together to think about interesting ideas for future Notes/Domino releases and especially to feed extra content to IBM/HCL to prepare for the next upcoming V11 release.

The Jam was led by Andrew Manby, product manager of Notes/Domino. Andrew emphasized the fact that V10 was mostly focused on the Server to get it up to speed for more modern technologies. For V11, they will focus more on the user interface. Especially for the Notes client.

During the presentation there were also some newbies presented:

– Domino V10 will be available for IBM i

– Domino Mobile Apps will also be released for Android later this year

– IBM Enterprise Integrator coming for V10 and V11

– Sametime 10 will be able to run without the need for a browser plugin

– Sametime 10 will also get rid of its dependency of DB2 and Websphere

– Simpler integration between Active Directory and Domino Directory

After the presentation we could brainstorm about four important squares ( Outcomes, Tasks, Challenges and Decisions) for  Administrators, Developers, users and executives.

After lunch we had another brainstorm session to categorize different ideas into no brainers/must haves, interesting to get introduced and nice to have.

Lots of interesting ideas have been noted and will be collected together with the outcomes of the nine other Jam sessions.

The collection of the different and even common ideas will be presented during an online Jam session. For Europe the session will be held the 30th of january at 3PM. You can subscribe for the session here

Recently Forrester published their Total Economic Impact study to show how companies can beneft from using Domino as their application development platform. The study can be accessed here.