Location is important – really

For a few days now, I tried to get Business Cards working in Sametime 8.5 using a dual repository ( LDAP / DominoApplication). I red almost all articles in the samtime wiki and in the sametime forum and was sure that my configuration was correct and should work. But nada. The LDAP part worked, but the Domino part didn’t.

So I turned on debug to see what was going wrong. I copied the Debug.Level.5 file to the Domino root directory and restarted the machine. The trace file was created but did not contain any hint regarding the issue.

Today, due to some frustration, I decided to reinstall the Domino and Sametime installation. I also decided to keep the standard installation paths and only changed the drive letter during setup.  During the initial setup, I installed the domino binaries into d:\domino and the data files into d:\dominodata. I did this kind of install several times ( I don’t like long pathnames) and it always worked without any error.

After all setup was done and the server came up, I watched the console and to my surprise, I saw the following

Debug level set to 5. … never saw that before after initializing debug.

And now the trace file shows, what is going wrong:

[08/03 10:05:59.468] Thread-23 document size 22 KB
[08/03 10:05:59.468] Thread-23 extractImage Exception:
java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.ibm.sametime.userinfo.userinfobb.ImageExtractor.documentSizeNotValid(Unknown Source)
at com.ibm.sametime.userinfo.userinfobb.ImageExtractor.extractImage(Unknown Source)
at com.ibm.sametime.userinfo.userinfobb.UserInfoNotesNsfBB.storeRetrievedValues(Unknown Source)

Well, shortly after, Rene Winkelmeyer pointed me to this thread in the Sametime Forum.

And as a conclusion, it seems to be important in some cases that the data directory is located inside the domino directory.