How to blow a Friday

Wow, did today suck. You see, a routine Sametime upgrade turned into an all day ordeal. I went into work, and I had two things I wanted to accomplish. The first was to install a new Sametime 6.5.1 instance on a Notes server in Las Vegas via remote control software. THAT went off without a hitch. The other job was to upgrade our existing Sametime 3.1 server in Chicago to 6.5.1 and our Domino server it resides on to 6.5.2. THAT did not go so well…

I started at 6:30 AM, thinking that the upgrade was a slam dunk. I shut down Sametime, and shut down Domino. I upgraded Domino to 6.5.2 and brought Domino back up (without the Sametime parameters in the notes.ini file.) Came up perfectly. So, I shut down Domino again, and proceeded to install Sametime 6.5.1. The install seemed to work fine, and then we got to the final setup procedure. BLAM, it hung on an error saying that it couldn’t create stconfig.nsf.

Now it got a little wierd, you see it actually DID create the stub of stconfig, but couldn’t create any documents within it, and then choked. I searched Lotus Support as well as the LDD Sametime forum, and there were maybe two mentions of similiar things. It seemed that within those mentions, that it was generally a corrupt address book or a corrupt ID file. So, I tried repairing and recreating and copying the NAB, I tried recerting the ID file, I tried an old copy of the ID file. Nothing.

So finally I decided that I was just going to uninstall everything and completely rebuild the server. So I did. Once I got to the end of the Sametime install, BLAM, it hung on an error saying it couldn’t create stauths.nsf. [SIGH] At this point I figured something HAD to be wierd with authentication. For some reason the box didn’t think my server had necessary rights to create the necessary info. So I basically blasted the name of the server into every possible ACL, and security access section of every document I could think of. By the time I was done, this server should have the rights to part the Red Sea.

And you guessed it, still didn’t work. I was pretty much at my wits end, but I thought. “You know what, I wonder if Directory Assistance is causing problems?” I thought it couldn’t hurt, so I disabled Directory Assistance, and tried again. To my surprise and relief, the install finished, and Sametime came up without a hitch. After it was up, I re-enabled DA (all of our Sametime users are in the secondary address book) and everything worked like a champ.

By this time it was 2PM. I had blown pretty much an entire day on this thing, and it was all because of some DA wierdness. I wanted to share this with you so if any of you run into a similiar problem, you know something else to try. Thank god it was Friday!