Month: August 2005

Sametime crash on Windows 2003 Server due to out of disk space…

And so there was. The common.diag log-file was a wropping 13,5 GB and was filling the entire drive! The file contained a lot of mumbo-jumbo lines.

The quick fix was to move the file to another drive, and restart the server. Now was the time to find the cause of the issue. After restarting the server the issue was still there since it didn’t take long for the file to reach 300 MB.

Searching the Sametime forum on developerWorks I found what looks like a solution to the problem. The issue is apparently only present for Sametime 6.5.1 on Windows 2003 Server with SP1 and there is a quick-fix until a proper fix is developed. The fix is described in technote 1203311 at IBM.com.

I’ll apply the fix (editing the registry) tonight and see what happens.

Eclipse error after upgrading to Java 1.5: “Specified VM install not found”

The actual upgrade went fine and there were no problems starting Eclipse or compiling code in Eclipse afterwards. Eclipse had automatically detected the new JVM and updated the JVM for the various projects. I kept getting errors saying “Specified VM install not found” when trying to launch Ant build files though.

After Googling a bit most other posts discussed launch configurations so I checked the launch configuration for the build files and there it was… For some reason the JVM isn’t automatically updated for launch configurations. Worth noting.


Selecting the 1.5 JVM from the list solved the problem.

Installing Novell SLES9 under VMWare

Yesterday I received an e-mail from Bernd Hort who is helping be beta-test LotusScript.doc. Bernd Horts company is running Domino 6.5.1 on Linux. He is having problems with national characters not being generated correctly when generated using the background agent on Linux so to test I had to install a Domino on Linux system. The documentation is correctly generated through the German Notes client.

I normally use VMWare 4.5 to test different operating systems and to test applications I normally wouldn’t “infect” my production laptop with, so I fired VMWare up and tried to install Domino 6.5.1 under Fedora Core 3. The install went perfectly but I was unable to start Domino due to issues with libnotes.so so I thought I would turn to a supported Linux distribution and settled on SLES9 since I have some experience with it.

After downloading the ISO images (a VERY nice feature of VMWare is that it allows you to connect an ISO image to the virtual machine so the guest operating system sees it as the normal CD-ROM drive) of the Novell homepage I stopped dead in the tracks. X11 was unable to start during the installation – this I could live with… What I couldn’t live with was that the installation screen was split into 4 smaller screens after an otherwise promising start.


The solution was of cause found on Novells webpage via Google . The solution is to change the framebuffer at boot time by adding the boot parameter “x11i=fbdev”. After doing this the installation is ticking away… Nice.


The last SLES9 distribution I used was SLES7 and I must say that it has come a long way since then… It is quite clear that it has become much more business-like and the earlier green SuSE layout has been changed to a very sleek-looking blue layout.

The framebuffer is automatically set correctly on successive boots.

After all this is done I can continue to install Domino and actually try to reproduce the codepage error.

Received an e-mail from Sametime Information


This note contains links (URLs) to recently published technical support documents (technotes) which answer frequently asked questions (FAQs) regarding IBM Lotus Sametime.

You are receiving this notification because you are one of the Sametime customers who have called us for technical support in the past 12 months. If you do not wish to receive notifications like this one from Sametime Information, please reply to this email and change the Subject field to ‘unsubscribe’ (without quotation marks).

This list of links can also be found in a Knowledge Collection (http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=477&uid=swg27006515), which we encourage you to bookmark because we update the collection periodically.

Title: How to Install and Use Notes Domino 6 to Schedule an Online (Sametime) Meeting (1154380)
Link: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=477&uid=swg21154380

Title: How to configure Community Services Clustering in Sametime ( 1196034)
Link: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=477&uid=swg21196034

Title: Sametime: Troubleshooting SSL for HTTP Configuration Problems on a Sametime Server (1098610)
Link: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=477&uid=swg21098610

Title: Complete Steps to Configure Sametime Integration with DWA 6.5.x (1159197)
Link: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=463&uid=swg21159197

Title: Sametime: How to Enable HTTP Tunnelling Over Port 80 (1090222)
Link: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=463&uid=swg21090222

Title: Sametime: Examples of How SIP Can Be Setup and Configured ( 1109136)
Link: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=463&uid=swg21109136

Title: Sametime: How to Enable Chat Logging (1086729)
Link: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=477&uid=swg21086729

Title: Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing (Sametime) e-Support’s Most Useful Links (1211819)
Link: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=477&uid=swg21211819

Title: How to Enable/Disable Instant Messaging Preferences in the Notes Client via Desktop Policies ( 1211673)
Link: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=477&uid=swg21211673

Title: Sametime: How to Turn on Additional Debugging for the Meeting Room Client and Broadcast Client (1086819)
Link: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=477&uid=swg21086819

Please consider providing us feedback on each of the technotes. Every IBM technote has a Rate This Page section at the bottom that you can use to tell us whether a technote meets your needs. Please mention “FAQ mailing” in the comments field, and please include suggestions for additional content, which would be helpful to you, but which you have not been able to find while searching on our web site.

Here are some other ways that you can access Sametime self-help support information on the Web:
— Register for My Support, which allows you to build a custom portal of support information and to subscribe to email notifications. Visit http://www.ibm.com/software/support/einfo.html to learn more.
— Visit the Lotus Sametime product support page at http://www.ibm.com/software/lotus/support/sametime/support.html.
— Participate in the user-to-user Lotus Sametime forum at http://www.lotus.com/ldd/stforum.nsf.
— Access Lotus Sametime Product Documentation, Release Notes, White Papers, Redbooks, etc at http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/notesua.nsf/find/sttoolkit
— Access the Sametime DeveloperWorks page for downloads, learning resources and more: http://www-136.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/products/instantmessaging
— Determine what problems are fixed in each release by viewing the Sametime Fix List database: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/stfixlist.nsf
— View the (often requested) FAQ response on Notes chat entitlement: http://www.lotus.com/products/product3.nsf/wdocs/e50f5c25b08769bf85256e61006739ec
— Subscribe to the Lotus Sametime support RSS feed. Visit http://www.ibm.com/software/support/rss/lotus/index.html?ca=rsslotus for help with RSS and for links to all the Lotus software RSS feeds, including the feed for Lotus Sametime.

Kind regards,

The IBM Lotus Sametime team

Inactivity timer for Sametime client embedded in Notes

This particular client is using the Sametime client embedded in the Notes 6.5.x client. The problem they are having is that for some reason the inactivity timer doesn’t kick in, that is users are never “Away” in Sametime.

In the Sametime Connect client users can specify the inactivity timer themselves setting the timeout period in the Preferences dialog.

The situation is different when using the client embedded in Lotus Notes. I have been a little surprised as to the information I found after doing some research on the subject. I knew users couldn’t change the inactivity period themselves but I thought it was hardcodet to 10 minutes or so. This is now the case. The inactivity timer in the embedded Sametime client is tied to the Logout (F5) functionality.

When you think of it is quite logical actually except that I haven’t met a customer who have actually implemented the logout functionality in Notes. We normally advise our customers to implement the logout in Windows instead since it locks the entire machine. Unfortunately a lot of customers don’t actually enforce this… 🙁

I checked Notes 7 beta 4 but the behaviour is the same there and the user cannot set the inactivity timer on an individual basis…

Notes 7 beta 4 preference page 1

Notes 7 beta 4 preference page 2

Notes 7 beta 4 preference page 3

Changing Content-Type header for JavaScript and CSS files

As I blogged about some time back I was having some problems when running in XHTML Strict mode since Domino sent my stylesheet as text/html and not text/css. The solution was to rename the content field and the Content-Type for the document.

Another way to solve the same issue is to use a Web Site rule and replace the Content-Type header for specific URL patterns. You need to be running Internet Sites for this to work.

I now use this solution successfully for both JavaScript and CSS-files.