Installing Lotus Connections 2.5 on Windows 2008 Server

The last two weeks I have had the honor of installing Lotus Connections 2.5 on Windows 2008 Server 64 bit with Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Twice. And what a change from my normal Windows 2003 Server. In this blog post I’ll outline some of the issues I ran into and what I had to pay special attention to.

First off Tivoli Directory Integrator 6.1.1 (the component that move data from LDAP to the Profiles SQL database) isn’t supported and doesn’t run on Windows 2008 Server. The TDI scripts provided with Lotus Connections 2.5 doesn’t work with TDI 7 which leaves you at a dead stop. Only solution as of now is to find a Windows 2003 Server or other Windows platform to run TDI. Hopefully Lotus Connections NEXT will use TDI 7.

Next issue I had to address was that Websphere Applicaton Server (WAS) 6.1 should be at fixlevel 19 before you create any profiles on a Windows 2008 Server. This meant that the profile couldn’t be created as part of the WAS installer. This wasn’t too big of an issue as it’s a best practice not create the profile during setup anyway. A benefit of doing it this way is that it allows you to create the profile in another location than between your WAS binary directory.

So all was well and good? Not really as the GUI tool to manage profiles isn’t supported on Windows 2008 Server either. There is however a manageprofiles command to manage profiles which may be used. The command looks rather convoluted but it goes something like this (I ran it was admin):

manageprofiles.bat -create -profileName AppSrv01
   -profilePath d:WASProfilesAppSrv01
   -templatePath c:ibmwebsphereappserverprofileTemplatesdefault
   -nodeName LotusConnectionsNode01
   -cellName LotusConnectionsCell01
   -hostName lc.example.com
   -isDefault
   -winserviceCheck true
   -winserviceAccountType specifieduser
   -winserviceUserName username
   -winservicePassword password
   -winserviceStartupType manual

The last few arguments create the Windows service. I have had some success doing this but most times I leave the “winservice”-arguments out and use WASService.exe to create the service instead.

wasservice -add LotusConnections
   -serverName server1
   -profilePath d:wasprofilesappsrv01
   -startupType automatic

When I installed Lotus Connection I had to run install.bat as admin to avoid having the SQL connection check fail.

Generally in Windows 2008 Server I found that paying special attention to drive and folder security made my life a lot easier. That goes for both WAS and IBM HTTP Server IHS). Additionally on one IHS server I had to manually install GSKit to enable SSL as it wasn’t installed by the installer. I also had to put GSKit (C:IBMGSK7lib) on the PATH in Windows. To symptom was that IHS couldn’t access the SSL keystore.

I hope this will help someone.