This week I was installing Sametime v11 on Linux as a test for a customer where I needed to confirm code written specifically for Windows would compile and work for Sametime on Linux. I hit several (now resolved) problems during the install that I wanted to share here.

Environment: RHEL 8.2 , no GUI, MongoDB, Domino v11 (not FP1), Sametime v11 FP1 Community Server

After installing Sametime v11 using the silent install option (edit the installer.properties file in the install “Server” directory and use the -i silent switch when running install.bin), the Domino console threw continual java errors trying to load staddin.

I did have the missing / broken symlinks similar to Darren Duke’s post here (not all the same ones but many of them) however once that was fixed I thought to go straight to upgrading to FP1.

On upgrading to FP1 (which can use the console installer) the program first uninstalls v11 then installs FP1. It said it completed successfully but when starting Domino and staddin I saw lots of errors about missing jar files. I checked the files and saw not only were the directories servlet , cgi-bin and html now entirely missing from /local/notesdata/domino many of the sametime files in /local/notesdata (ls -l st*) were suddenly missing too.

So something was wrong. I thought to uninstall and do over but unfortunately the uninstaller.bin didn’t exist (neither did the _uninst directory). So I opted to reinstall v11 over v11 FP1 again which worked and put all the missing files and folders back, I took copies of them then installed FP1 again and this time it did work. Sort of - I still got a NSD on launch.

The NSD was being generated by staddin trying to load the stchatlogging library which was strange, Mongo installed fine and was running, I set the logging criteria correctly in stconfig.nsf so I was at a loss. I opened a PMR and they found that the error was in the server not finding the stchatlogging.nsf database. Well that database was definitely present and I could get at it BUT the ACL looked completely wrong (see below) it looked like the ACL of a template not a database. I cleaned up the ACL and also put the Sametime server in it explicitly and everything then loaded perfectly.

So I got there in the end but it’s worth knowing that I got no errors on any of the installs, all of them said they completed successfully. Hopefully this saves some of you some time.