Sametime 8.5 frustration

I have done a some 15 sametime installations over the past few month. Most of them to prepare a session for the upcoming AdminCamp in Gelsenkirchen later this year. All installation are on Linux.

I have also setup a productive environment for our company which runs fine except a few issues.

• During the past 2 weeks our community server ( the only component taht is still running on Windows ) constantly crashes every few hours. It does not really crash but it seems that all of the ST* services are stopped at once and then restart. The services all show a status of “started” after such a “crash” but noone is able to connect to the community server. The only way to get it to work again is to restart the whole server.

There are no clues in the log and nobody is able to explain his very strange behaviour.

• I tried to uninstall Sametime 8.5 embedded from my 8.5.1 FP3 client using setup.exe /v”EMBEDDED_UNINSTALL=true”

  After I restarted the client sametime 8.5 embedded was still in place. The only way to uninstall Sametime 8.5 and revert back to embedded Sametime 8.0.2 was to completly uninstall Lotus Notes and install the client after restart.

  I have posted this in the Lotus Sametime Forum but no answer. OK there is an answer but not confirmed in any way from IBM side.

No problem if it is a bug. But then pls. confirm.

• Am I the only one who gets

  org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethodBase getResponseBody
  WARNUNG: Going to buffer response body of large or unknown size. Using getResponseBodyAsStream instead is recommended.

  warning messages on the community server console on Linux. I don’t think so. Also posted this in the Sametime Forum. No answer so far.

No problem if this is not a relevant issue. But then pls. at least give a short feedback.

• The next one is with group authentication and assign policies to group when using LDAP. Good to know that there is a hotfix available.

  Why is this one not posted on fixcentral?

  And another strange thing about this issue is that the problem does not occur on one of two identically installed machines.

No explaination, no hint where to look into to find a clue.

Another question that I asked in the Sametime Forum is about re-installing a (registered) community server.

No answer so far. The only hint comes from another admin / user / customer. And to be honest. If uninstalling the whole installation including all other components the community server is registered with is the (only) solution , then there must be something wrong with the concept.

There are many more issues I ran into like grayed out icons in the IC ( although the option is checked in the policy ), and “community must be defined as Standard Community” ( although the option is unchecked in the policy ) where I cannot find any hint on how to solve neither in the Knowledge Base nor in the Samtime WiKi or Forum.

At least a short (official) response to my posts would have been great; just to know that someone who is responsible for the product cares about it.

At the moment I am a little bit frustrated. Shall I call a consultant?  Oh, wait better a whole buch of consultants, because “one consultant is no consultant”. What will I tell my boss the next time he asks me if we can start to rollout Sametime in the organization? “Great product, but … “.

I know that it is all my fault that I ran into the problems. And maybe my biggest fault is that I am not a native english speaker and not able to describe my problems with Sametime in a way a first level supporter in Babudistanki / Pamplonistan can understand.

If you never had the described issues, great for you. But if you have seen at least one of the problems and have a solution or workaround, pls. share your knowledge. Any help is appreciated.