Taking Notez – Island Pond Consulting

For my lab environment I use the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). One limitation is the difficulty setting static IP addresses. (For those in the know, I could use Elastic IPs but that is a solution that I would discourage for reasons I’ll not mention here.) Consequently I have a script infrastructure that makes maintaining hosts files easier. My machines are named in a manner that is independent of the solution. For example win3.davalen.com is also ldap.renovations.com or, another example, win2.davalen.com is also the Sametime System Console / DMGR system, sametime.renovations.com.  What I failed to take into account when I first named these systems was the need for my hosts file to reference both names when it came to the DMGR.

Initial hosts file.

Let me explain. I did not encounter any issues with the environment. I installed the Sametime System Console which resulted in a federated / managed node with a deployment manager, DMGR. I updated the system to use an LDAP server successfully. And I added a Sametime Community Server. It was not until I added a Sametime Proxy (web chat) server, that I had issues.  Why? Well, the problem emerged at this point because it was the first WebSphere based component added since I installed the console. The error message during install was that the DMGR could not be reached.  I talented to the host sametime.renovations.com over port 8700 and 8701 without issue and I was stumped. Then, for reasons that I can’t comprehend, I decided to look more closely at the DMGR configuration. When I did I realized that the install script grabbed the system host name, win2, as the host name for the DMGR. As soon as I updated my hosts file on the proxy component server, I was able to complete the install and the proxy server was successfully federated into my Sametime cell.

Whether you have a problem of this kind or some other adventure, I am happy to report there are a number of blogs and resources available for guiding an installer through the process of installing an enterprise solution. One of these is the Knowledge Center. This resource replaced the ‘old’ product Wiki and the revised format is far superior to the former.