After Quickr 8.1 Upgrade HTTP Won’t Initialize

Being the long time Domino guy that I am, upgrades don’t frighten me. I’ve upgraded our entire server environment by myself in half a day without batting an eye. I do generally wait a day or two after initial release of the code to make sure there are no serious red flags thrown up in the community, but I decided to throw caution to the wind with the Quickr 8.1 upgrade.

Basically, I decided to upgrade Domino to 8.0.1 and Quickr to 8.1. Friday. At 5:15 PM (I leave at 5:45)

Needless to say, things didn’t go as anticipated. I upgraded Domino, then upgraded Quickr and then fired the whole thing up. Domino seemed to load fine, but HTTP was stuck at initializing. For the life of me I couldn’t get it to load. The weird thing was, when I did a QUIT HTTP at the console, all of a sudden all the Quickr components loaded up, and then promptly shut down as I had told HTTP to quit. Hmmmm…

So I go looking for others with issues. The only thing I really find is the wonderful installation description by Daniele Vistalli. He did mention that you should disable http when you upgrade Domino to let Domino fully upgrade. Otherwise it might crash with nquickplace.dll. I figure this might be the issue and give it a shot. Do the re-install this way. No luck.

So as it is Friday, and our Quickr server wasn’t really being used anyway yet, I went home. I ate supper, then continued working on the problem from home. So now I reinstall products again, I UNinstall and reinstall, I try tons of little tricks and nothing works. Searching the forums and technotes doesn’t really reveal anything similar being seen by anyone. Frustrated as can be, I decided to go to bed, sleep on it and try again in the morning.

The next day the same cycle pretty much repeats itself, but after banging my head against the wall for so long, I finally find a year-old Quickplace technote that seems like it might be my issue: HTTP task does not load after installing QuickPlace on Domino Server.

Anyway, in this technote it states that HTTP just throws an error and exits. Wasn’t quite the same. This was also Quickplace and not Quickr proper. So THAT wasn’t quite the same. It also said that the QuickplaceQuickplace folder would be missing databases. Once again, it wasn’t quite the same as my LotusQuickrlotusquickr folder HAD all of the right databases. What I did find the same was this:

Place does not exist or is marked for deletionA-HA! We have lift-off. I hadn’t gotten that error all along, but on Saturday morning I started seeing it. They recommended deleting the whole Quickplacequickplace (well LotusQuickrLotusQuickr in my case) folder and letting Quickr re-create it on its own. So I did that, restarted the server, and HTTP loaded. Finally.

So at least the server was finally up and running. I still had to tweak a bunch of things in the INI file and do some upgrades to the places, and I still have one place that is showing the old yellow color scheme and I can’t figure out why. But it’s running and that’s all that counts right now.

Anyway, I wanted to post this out there in case anyone else ran into this. If your Quickr 8.1 upgrade causes HTTP to be unresponsive or to show Initializing then deleting the LotusQuickr folder and letting it rebuild might help. At least it did for me.

If there are any Quickr experts out there that want to add to this, or let me know any other tips of tricks to know while upgrading or running into issues, please do!