Blog

Our News/Articles/Opinions/Technotes from the world of HCL Digital Solutions

Installing Domino Fix Packs on Windows 2008 R2

I’ve come across few “gotchas”  in recent months that seem to be catching customers over and over again.  Particularly when it comes to installing Domino Fix packs on 8.5.X on Windows 2008 R2, I’ve heard the following scenarios multiple times:

1. You get an error saying you don’t have a valid version of 8.5.x installed.  You will probably need to uninstall previous hotfixes and/or fix packs before it will let you install. (Note that we’d always strongly advise making sure you have a valid backup or snapshot available before installing/uninstalling anything!)

2.  You get an error saying an arbitary Domino .dll is in use even though you are sure that no Domino tasks are running.  This is really common.  The vast majority of the time you just need to right click the fixpack file and “Run as Administrator”, however I’ve seen cases where you need to set Domino Server services to manual and reboot the whole OS before you can upgrade.

It’s nice to have this information before you start so if you’re under pressure for time you know you’re not going mad! Let us know if you found this information useful!

Cormac McCarthy – Domino People Ltd

5 thoughts on “Installing Domino Fix Packs on Windows 2008 R2

  • Using Sysinternals procMon, I’ve found that its commonly been the SNMP service that has the nnotes.dll locked. So as a matter of course, I stop that service as well when doing an update. Seems to work 99% of the time. As we run all our servers on VMWare, I have also had to shut down the vmTools service as well on one server.

    A third problem we’ve had is various .hf files being left behind by previous installs, that the latest update can’t delete so it stops with a message like this “Can’t rename old nnotes.dll: access problem“. The trick I have found is to open the Domino Program folder and locate the corresponding .hf file [in this case nnotes.hf] and delete it manually. Then press OK and the update will continue.

  • After really long and drawn out debugging sessions, I found that it was CommVault backup software (Hitachi Data Protection) that was preventing installing FP’s, or IF’s. I had to stop three CommVault Services.
    Process Explorer did not “Find” anything.
    I usually put Domino, and NSD in Manual, and reboot before installing.
    Another person suggested that WMI can get in the way.

    BUT if you do use Domino SNMP, don’t forget to stop the Domino AND Windows SNMP Services.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

You may use these HTML tags and attributes:

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>