Thanks to Lars Berntrop-Bos and the news of Domino 8.5.1 I went to download it from IBM partner site. During the download I remembered that the last time I did a Domino upgrade on Linux, our Sametime stopped working as upgrade overridden / deleted some Sametime files and folders. Hence, for the reasons specified in previous upgrade article, I decided to also download newest Sametime 8.5.

In the past, installing Sametime was almost a piece of cake. You installed Domino server, installed Sametime, did some configuration voodoo and you were done. Now, I am presented with 7 or 8 binaries to download. What on earth is System Console Server? Why do I need separate install for 7 other things that were mostly included in one binary in previous release? Why do I need WebSphere Application Server? And I am not even starting on DB2.

Thankfully, uncle Google led me to this blog, where all possible options are described in detail. Now, apparently, to run all new and shiny features, you need at least two servers. Most likely because mixing Domino and Websphere Application Server is not a good idea if not impossible. If you are willing to sacrifice all new and cool meeting and conferencing features, you can keep your one dedicated server and run Sametime 8.5 Classic.

My real question is, what was IBM thinking? I get that separating each and every major feature of Sametime may mean better performance, but I really cannot see smaller companies (up to 150 employees) sacrificing at least one additional server for the sake of running a simple messaging and meeting application. Specially not those (like the one I work at) that already use other meeting and conferencing software. How can I go to my boss and tell him that we need Sametime for meeting and collaboration, when it takes more resources than existing implementation of competitive software? Also, integrating WAS as a framework? Really?

Phew… now with that off my chest, I am off to prepare a plan of upgrading…

First in line were our internal servers. It took my colleague a significant amount (and by significant, I mean up to 5 times what was our worst case prediction) of time to upgrade.  Upgrade went without a glitch. Problem was, that one server couldn’t start up JVM anymore and both internal servers were now failing to log people in. First was solved by copying JVM from one of our 8.5.1 servers. Second, was a tedious task of finding an option to disable SSO using AD instead of Notes Address Book.

With that sorted and running for several days, it was time to start upgrading remaining servers. One of them runs on 64 bits, btw. Install went fine, quick and did not enable SSO with AD.  Hurrah! Other servers (32-bit ones) were not as kind. All failed to work after starting for the first time. Seemed to be some problem with java controller. Disabled it and ran the server. Failed. I then performed an upgrade again, at which point, install program started bitching as windows service for Domino Server was already of the same version. Ignoring that, I ran the server again. Nope, service shut down with erra again. I then disabled java controller at start up and started the server, only to quit it as soon as it was fully operational. Why? To enable java controller. After performing that task, I started the service, again, and then it finally worked. Yipi!

The only server remaining on 8.0.2 is our Sametime server, which runs on Linux. As far as I know, 8.5.1 is still not out for RHEL.

We installed our Sametime 8 server on Domino 8.0.0 on Linux platform (our very first Domino Linux install) and I must agree, that it is one of our most stable servers. However, as always, there is a catch. Now, that 8.0.2 is out, we finally decided to upgrade our servers. So we also upgraded our smoothly running Sametime server. Unfortunately, it appears that Domino 8.0.2 (despite using update option) removes certain directories used by Sametime, thus making it non-operational. What I had to do is perform an upgrade of Sametime to 8.0.1, that luckily exists. I expect that if I already had installed Sametime 8.0.1 in the past, I would have to perform a re-install for Sametime.