Sametime Proxy “Loading” Problem

Having recently installed a new Sametime 11 environment on Linux with Sametime Proxy I ran into a problem with the proxy client where it would continually show “loading” when starting a conversation. Awareness of users on other servers worked, type ahead worked, it would open a chat window but just show a looping circle that never ended. Even if I tried talking to myself (usually a good test).

I have been working with HCL for a few days on this and it seemed to point to an issue with Mongodb as they found a failure to connect in the logs. That was odd because Mongo is installed on the same server as the ST Community server and was binding to localhost on 127.0.0.1, it didn’t appear to have any problems but the chatlogging service couldn’t connect so the Sametime Proxy clients wouldn’t work. It’s worth knowing what I subsequently found out which is that if the chat logging service doesn’t start up correctly, the Sametime clients will continue to work but the Sametime Proxy clients won’t.

Thanks to HCL identifying that the issue was with Mongo, I got it fixed and here are the changes I made.

Wanting Mongo to bind to the fqhn of the machine not localhost - originally I edited /etc/mongo.conf to use bindIpAll to bind all ips and that should have worked but instead I ended up using bindIP to explicitly bind the mongo service to the ip that the fqhn resolved to. That worked but to access the mongo console I had to then type “mongo -host fqhn” .. if I just typed “mongo” I’d get connection refused as it would default to using 127.0.0.1.

Now Mongodb was listening on the right port and hostname I had two other places to change in Sametime so they matched. The sametime.ini MONGO_URI setting and the chatlogging.ini CL_MONGO_HOST setting.

With all of that set I restarted Sametime and the proxy worked fine.