Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Sametime 8.5.1 client - beware!!

Ok, so I consider it my duty to report that the ST client V8.5.1 has some issues.... Especially when you're implementing Audio/Video services and you want to limit those services to a small population of users....which is what we are trying to do currently.... So, the majority of users in our 100k environment have the 8.5.1 client. These users can actually only use AV services if they are on the VPN but regardless of that, they must register with the AV proxyRegistrar even if our policy dictates they don't even have AV services! This is because the 8.5.1 client tries to login to the proxyRegistrar server before it even looks at the policy.... Which means if you have 38k users logging in and only 40 of them have AV enabled through policy, then you have 38k proxy registrar logins (with the corresponding 38k LDAP hits)..... This situation is a big problem and is only really solved by upgrading the client to 8.5.2+, which is no trivial thing in a large environment. Recommendations to alleviate the problem: turn SIP security off so the PR registration doesn't have to do an additional authentication... It will still do a lookup on the user to make sure they exis but won't try and authenticate. There are some other recommendations to increase the LDAP cache which I can point you at if you contact me at andy@imcollaboration.com

Monday, April 16, 2012

Important tip on Sametime installs - increase the JVM heap size for Installation Manger

I wanted to mention this tip as I have just finished my part of a 80+ Sametime server environment and this tip helps the installer work so much better (including helping it not to crash "out of memory" sometimes):

  • Increase the JVM heap size for the Installation Manager
  • Close Installation Manager
  • Go to the Installation Manager install directory (C:\Program Files\IBM\Installation Manager\eclipse)
  • Add the line "-Xmx1024m" to IBMIM.ini
  • Run the offering launchpad again to invoke the installation
Thanks to Tony Payne and Andy Yiu from IBM for this tip.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Sametime View article

I forgot to mention that I recently published a general article on Sametime 8.5.x in the View and I am currently writing another article on upgrading your Sametime Community server to 8.5.2 IFR1.
You can see the View article here:
Sametime 8.5.2 — Unifying Communication and Collaboration in the Enterprise

Monday, February 27, 2012

Great link for information on Sametime

I have decided to start blogging a little more now after a recent hiatus caused by too much work :-).
I came across the following link on Instant-Tech's blog which has lots of great Sametime information:

http://blog.instant-tech.com/2008/08/very-useful-sametime-debugging-faqs.html

I also saw another blog which details a lot of the information about managing client settings that I had blogged about, so I wanted to tie the two together - check out this link:

http://kbild.ch/2011/05/change-sametime-client-8-5-x-settings-after-deployment-through-managed-settings-xml/