Some notes on upgrading to Sametime 11.5

Couple of quick notes on upgrading to Sametime 11.5 Premium (from Sametime 11.0 FP2). For this article I’ll concentrate on the chat server, so Sametime Community server and Sametime proxy.

This is based on a recent real-life install on Windows 2016 where all components sit on the same host.

Firstly, it would be remiss not to say that generally with anything related to Sametime nowadays I’ll check what Ales Lichtenberg has written and here is no different. This guide works but I’d a couple of addendums from my experience.

While upgrading to Sametime 11.5 Premium, you shouldn’t need to edit MongoDB setup (thankfully). The version of MongoDB given for this example is 4.2.10. (if you haven’t already upgraded MongoDB to 4.2.8 or later do, it will install it’s own service rather than you having to do so manually and will run better all round from my experience).

The Community Server is straight forward and worked without issue.

The proxy server there’s a couple of things I’d note. You do need to shutdown Domino and the existing proxy service task. However MongoDB must be running for the installer to complete. (this wasn’t immediately obvious to me).

Secondly if after upgrade you suddenly can’t connect to the web URL, you might see something like this in your catalina log (<sametimproxyinstallpath>\logs\catalina*.log)-

13-Nov-2020 10:07:46.988 SEVERE [main] org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.handleSubClassException Failed to initialize component [Connector[HTTP/1.1-8443]]
org.apache.catalina.LifecycleException: Protocol handler initialization failed
at org.apache.catalina.connector.Connector.initInternal(Connector.java:1042)
at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.init(LifecycleBase.java:136)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardService.initInternal(StandardService.java:533)
at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.init(LifecycleBase.java:136)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardServer.initInternal(StandardServer.java:1057)
at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.init(LifecycleBase.java:136)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.load(Catalina.java:724)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.load(Catalina.java:746)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:62)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:498)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.load(Bootstrap.java:302)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:472)
Caused by: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: C:\sametimeproxy\wildcard.pfx (The system cannot find the file specified)

i.e. the upgrade removed our wildcard certificate for for some reason. Thankfully the upgrade procedure does an automatic backup of your sametimeproxy directory prior to upgrade.

I just copied and pasted the .pfx file from there and restarted the server and all was good.

I’d also note that the Sametime Proxy now runs as a service rather than a scheduled task that runs on restart, which is very much welcomed.

Please contact us for more information. I hope you found this useful!

Cormac McCarthy – Domino People Ltd.