While the Lotus Connections 2.5 installation guide is quite comprehensive there are a couple of flaws a non full fleshed Websphere application server administrator (like me) won’t spot immediately, hence falling into the trap.

I was banging my head the past few weeks, not being able to determine why on earth I wasn’t able to set-up a network deployment of Lotus Connections. The error message was pretty trivial and documented in the Lotus Connections wiki.

CLFRP0258E: The installation of feature {0} failed while creating WebSphere® Application Server Variables.

Hunting through the detailed error messages in the log though didn’t make me any wiser. Until I got the tip (thanks Justin) that the application server profile has to be unmanaged prior to the installation of Lotus Connections as it will be federated as part of the installation.

This is clearly documented on page 36 of the installation guide (“The node must be unmanaged before you install”), however, other paragraphs further out indicated that the application server is being managed by the deployment manager. Core examples are on page 37 explaining that security should only be enabled on the deployment manager in order to not having to repeat the steps for each node, which indicated to me that the node must be managed at this point in time.

I am sure this procedure can be found all over the World Wide Web. However, I need to document it for myself here so I don’t have to search for it again.

Stop the Websphere application server.

Open the command prompt (in Windows) and browse to the Websphere home\bin\ directory. Issue ‘wsadmin.bat -conntype NONE’

This will come up with a message “WASX7357I: By request, this scripting client is not connected to any server process. Certain configuration and application operations will be available in local mode.”, which is pretty much confirming that the wsadmin is not connected to any server process.

Once launched issue ‘securityoff’ to the wsadmin console.

Restart the Websphere application server.

Just a quick note to everyone who is going to set-up Lotus Notes Traveler 8.5.1 on the Nokia E63. We have had one issue where Traveler did not start synchronising after the successful set-up on the mobile device. Instead the Traveler home screen got stuck and the whole S60 operating system reacted very slowly.

IBM technical support is referring to this as the “home screen issue” and is working with Nokia on a solution. In the meantime you can request a test fix from IBM that will disable the Traveler home screen. Feel free to quote PMR 36532.120.796 if you are experiencing similar issues.

This morning I was stumbling upon a very interesting issue in Lotus Notes/Domino that involved truncated documents on a server replica. This is an issue as the database on the server is the only one, besides a number of local replicas on laptops.

A bit of research on the web unveiled that Almar Diel has encountered a similar problem, which pointed me towards the right solution.

In order to get the full documents back onto the server replica I had to find the laptop that was holding the replica with the corrupt replication formula as this had to be cleared out as described in workaround option 2 of this IBM technote.

This will ensure that all documents replicated from now on would not be appearing as truncated documents anymore on the server. In order to fix the existing truncated documents though, I had to remove the documents from the server replica without leaving deletion stubs. This can easily be achieved in utilising Julian Robichaux’ stub-less delete function documented here. Clearing out the replication history of the local database and issuing a new replication did make the documents re-appearing on the server replica in there entirety.

Thanks to Almar and Julian for documenting your solutions!

If I was managing Apache web servers day after day I would have probably known the answer to that issue straight away. Instead I had to utilise Google quite a bit in order to find out how to add Office 2007 documents as mime type for the Domino web service: Microsoft Office 2007 documents do not open/save correctly when accessed over the web

Without changing the httpd.cnf file Word 2007 documents for example are recognised as “Compressed (zipped) Folder”, which makes it impossible to associate the file with Microsoft Office.

It’s not like Office 2007 isn’t around since about 2 years. How could this have slipped through the Lotus Domino 8.5.1 release by IBM?