Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Unresponsive Sametime Server And Its Effect On Other Servers

Right when we were about to leave yesterday, we got two helpdesk calls. One was from a user who couldn't open a document in a web app. The second was from a user who couldn't open DWA. So, we asked if it was OK for me to look at the code for the app (there was what appeared to be a JS error from the onload event) and we had the DWA user login to the old school webmail. Two random calls, right?

When I got home I was paged with a problem that nobody could get into DWA. So I tried and it didn't work for me either. Just a white screen trying to load. The first rule of server troubleshooting is to check the console. So, I did this and I saw this message sporadically: "Error connecting to server IM/ORG: Remote system no longer responding". Well, I know that DWA has integrated chat and I recalled that as my Notes 8 Basic was shutting down at the office the "Connecting..." message was in my Sametime status. I didn't think anything of it at the time - I thought it was just because I was closing the client. But at home I checked the console of the Sametime server. Everything seemed fine. All of the tasks were running, but we couldn't talk to it from other servers. So I shut down that Domino partition and viola!, DWA began working. I fired Sametime back up and it was all good.

I later recalled that the web app also uses STLinks to allow chatting with the document owner. So, this unresponsive Sametime server caused DWA to fail as well as web apps using STLinks. Gotta love it!

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