Sametime, that dirty, lying, no good...
Category Sameitme Administration Tip
This is something that catches new Sametime administrators all the time, and something I often retrieve telephone calls or emails about.
Sametime and Domino have this terrible habit of lying to their administrators. People that have been administering Sametime servers for a while are well aware of it, but these new folks that are installing Sametime so they can get their IM entitlement often aren't and it causes them great frustration.
Here's the deal, when you've installed Domino and Sametime and you startup you Domino server, Domino will display this message on the Domino console:
Woohoo, they cry, the Sametime server is up, so what do they try? They try to login to Sametime, no joy server cannot be reached, and if they enabled the HTTP tunnelling option during Sametime install, they also can't get to the Sametime Web page.
So thinking something is wrong they do what most admins do, and restart the server again. They see the Sametime Server running message again, try again and it fails again. Now they cry with not with a Woohoo, but a WTF.
Well what's going on is that the Domino message is like Microsoft support, the information is 100% correct but it doesn't help you at all. The Sametime server consists of many services, and "Sametime Server" is just the first one to get loaded, which in turn then loads the other Sametime services that are required for your Sametime Server to be running. So the message is displayed when the first service is loaded, but not necessarily any of the others. Depending on your hardware, it can take many minutes for a Sametime server to be fully started. You can see if your Sametime server is fully loaded by looking at the services that are running, in windows should see a list like this with all services started.
If any ST service doesn't show started under it's status, then your Sametime server is still loading.
Sametime and Domino continue their lies when you shut Domino down, by typing Q for example in the console. You will watch the Domino console display shutdown messages, ending with the server shutdown and then the Domino console window goes away. Sadly Domino is often lying and in fact, just as before but in the opposite way. Some of the Sametime services haven't yet shutdown, as you can see if you look at the Windows Services that are running. This often leads to issues where people think the server is down, and then restart it, which often puts Sametime into a "funky" state. An extension of this is that sometimes Domino can crash, and the Domino console etc. goes away, but users can still use the Sametime connect client as the Sametime services are still running.
So the lesson to take away here is that you need to ignore the Domino console messages about Sametime startup and shutdown and rely more on the state of the services that are running
This is something that catches new Sametime administrators all the time, and something I often retrieve telephone calls or emails about.
Sametime and Domino have this terrible habit of lying to their administrators. People that have been administering Sametime servers for a while are well aware of it, but these new folks that are installing Sametime so they can get their IM entitlement often aren't and it causes them great frustration.
Here's the deal, when you've installed Domino and Sametime and you startup you Domino server, Domino will display this message on the Domino console:
Woohoo, they cry, the Sametime server is up, so what do they try? They try to login to Sametime, no joy server cannot be reached, and if they enabled the HTTP tunnelling option during Sametime install, they also can't get to the Sametime Web page.
So thinking something is wrong they do what most admins do, and restart the server again. They see the Sametime Server running message again, try again and it fails again. Now they cry with not with a Woohoo, but a WTF.
Well what's going on is that the Domino message is like Microsoft support, the information is 100% correct but it doesn't help you at all. The Sametime server consists of many services, and "Sametime Server" is just the first one to get loaded, which in turn then loads the other Sametime services that are required for your Sametime Server to be running. So the message is displayed when the first service is loaded, but not necessarily any of the others. Depending on your hardware, it can take many minutes for a Sametime server to be fully started. You can see if your Sametime server is fully loaded by looking at the services that are running, in windows should see a list like this with all services started.
If any ST service doesn't show started under it's status, then your Sametime server is still loading.
Sametime and Domino continue their lies when you shut Domino down, by typing Q for example in the console. You will watch the Domino console display shutdown messages, ending with the server shutdown and then the Domino console window goes away. Sadly Domino is often lying and in fact, just as before but in the opposite way. Some of the Sametime services haven't yet shutdown, as you can see if you look at the Windows Services that are running. This often leads to issues where people think the server is down, and then restart it, which often puts Sametime into a "funky" state. An extension of this is that sometimes Domino can crash, and the Domino console etc. goes away, but users can still use the Sametime connect client as the Sametime services are still running.
So the lesson to take away here is that you need to ignore the Domino console messages about Sametime startup and shutdown and rely more on the state of the services that are running
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Comments
Thanks for the reminder!
Bob
Posted by Bob Brodsky At 10:15:00 AM On 04/28/2008 | - Website - |
Posted by Chris Miller At 10:17:14 PM On 04/28/2008 | - Website - |