Carl Tyler's Blog

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Hidden away in the Sametime program directory is a little executable called STDebugTool.exe, it's not documented anywhere publicly so what does it do? Well it turns out if you've ever spoke to Lotus Support with a Sametime issue they'll sometimes have you add a a couple of lines to the Sametime.INI one is probably [Debug] and the other would be a line relating to the area you are having problems, now a few of these lines are documented in Technotes, but most of them you only ever get if you call in with an issue and Lotus want to get debug output. When these changes are implemented you end up with debug text files (sometimes very very large files) in the Trace directory below the Sametime program directory. The problem with this approach is that debug parameters in the Sametime.ini don't take effect until you reeboot. This is fine for smaller organizations, but for large organizations, taking a server down just to enable a debug parameter can be very tedious to it's users. So this is where STDebugtool.exe comes into play.

STDebugTool allows you to add some of these parameters (but not all) whilst the server is active and running. So how does it work? Well the first thing you need to do is start STDebugTool from a command prompt, this will give you a chevron > command prompt. When this is running you can now set debug parameters, but how do you know what debug parameters are accepted? Well after a bit of playing around if you type "f" (case sensitive) into the debugtool it will return a long list of possible parameters (you'll be amazed at how many there are). ? will also return some simple help.

So now that you have a debug parameter lets enable one, lets say for example you're having some issues with LDAP and you want to turn on LDAP debug. Here's what you'd do, into the stdebugtoll you would type (case sensitive) s VP_LDAP_TRACE 1 followed by enter (I assume s stands for set), you can put in multipe debug parameters. Once you have set the parameter, you can type in "r" for them to take effect (I am guessing r stands for refresh), then you can quit out of the debugtool by typing "q". These debug parameters will now take effect until you reboot the server or you change their value.

Click on more to see the 6.5.1 debug parameters that are available...