I’ve closed my company Asia/Pacific Computer Services and am getting close to retirement from the IT industry. Having started at IBM Australia in January 1970 I doubt if I’ll reach the 50-year mark, but I’ve had a pretty long innings.
I’m still trying to keep my hand in with Notes/Domino. Every month or two over the last half year I’ve made a number of attempts to install IBM Domino and Notes 9.0 then and more recently the 9.0.1 versions. Note that this is a “virgin” installation, with no baggage left behind from earlier versions of Notes.
I reckoned that I had been sitting on Notes/Domino 8.5.3 for far too long, and that I’d have the typical smooth and painless upgrade to the next version.
The Domino server installation went swimmingly, no problems whatsoever,
However I’ve never managed to get the Notes Designer/Admin Client to install. It always reaches close to the end, as shown by the progress bar, then complains that the “RCP Base plug-in not found” followed by a roll-back of the installation:
Despite all my research (at the IBM Support website and everywhere else I could think of), I’ve not been able to get an understanding of what has been going wrong and how to overcome the stalemate.
I didn’t ever experience this problem with Notes 8.5.3. … What on earth is going wrong?
Your comments, suggestions and advice would be greatly appreciated (if polite)!.
MY ENVIRONMENT:
Windows 8.1 64-bit system. I always install Domino and Notes on a non—system drive, let’s call it the G: drive, with plenty of free disk space (this helps minimize the space needed for my daily backup of the system drive). Latest version of 32-bit Java installed.
Have you checked this link
ReplyDeletehttp://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21661626
Yesy, Frederik, I did see that IBM Support article. There certainly is a file named MSVCR71.dll with non-zero file size stored in the C:\Windows\SysWow64 directory on this 64-bit Windows 8.1 system (in my earlier attempts it was Windows 8.0).
ReplyDeleteThere are also other instances of files with this name stored in various other directories that were installed with by other software, I wonder if this is a case of "DLL hell" whereby the Notes 9.0.1 installer finds one of the others and it is unsuitable fr some reason. This clouds the picture, I suppose.
But even if the this DLL didn't exist in that Windows directory, the article states that the the Notes installer will utilize its own MSVCR71.dll provided in the installation package. (This doesn't seem to have been used, but it's very hard to tell what was going on when the failure occurred.)
I wonder why I am encountering this problem with Notes 9.0 and 9.0.1 but never with Notes 8 (under both Windows 8 and Windows 7).
It seems rather silly, as the support articles states, that "there will be no trace or error logs in \workspace\logs directly. The only files that will exist are the rcplauncher.log and shutdown.log" because such logs might assist in problem determination. (Anyway, those two mentioned logs are non-existent on the system.)
It's all too obscure and inscrutable!
I think that the problem lies in an incompatible setting or configuration somewhere in the 8.5.3 directories.
ReplyDeleteSee this article: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21245159
for a procudure to backup and clean the old install, then do a clean install.
Does that help?
Another tip would be to get the latest and greatest 9.0.1. There has been a flurry of fixpacks and intermediate fixes, some of which I was glad to say goodbye to.
ReplyDeleteAlso there are JVM fixes, some of which are decidedly non-obvious to install correctly. I respectfully point you to eknori's solution:
http://www.eknori.de/2015-03-24/a-smallish-problem-installing-jvmpatch_sr16fp3_w64_901-3_server/
which also works great for the 32-bit versions of the JVM patch.
You should make sure the versions of Notes and Domino JVM match by opening a commandline, going to ,Notes or Domino program dir>\jvm\bin and executing: java -version
Latest version per FixCentral:
Notes client : 9.0.1FP3IF3 => Fix pack 3 intermediate fix 3
JVM: Java 1.6SR16FP3_IF1
Although Notes FP3 installs a JVM update, it is already superseded. One of the more interesting features of the interim JVM versions was a bug that breaks some LS2J code. Another is that mismatches between Domino and Notes JVM mismatches can result in the remote console not working. Luckily both were solved very quickly by IBM.
Any luck solving?
ReplyDeleteYes, Lars. It was the Notes Install Cleanup Executable (NICE) tool at http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21459714 which gave me the clue I needed to overcome the failed installation.
DeleteI hadn't come across NICE before, so many thanks for pointing it out.
The initial screen displayed by NICE gave me the vital clue, that the most likely cause was with leftovers from old Notes 8.5.3 installation.
I used to put all my versions of Notes and Domino software onto the G: drive. The folder names reflected the Notes version, with Notes 8.5.3 installed in a folder named G:\Notes853 (and Domino in folder G:\Domino853, and so on).
After a disk started showing warning signs of imminent failure early in 2015, I installed a brand new hard disk, formatted it to become drive E: and then copied the entire contents of the G: drive into a subfolder called "G" on the E: drive. I did the same sort of "emulation" for other logical drives E, F, H, I and J on the failing hard disk.
I did this to free up drive letters F, G, H, I and J (which I needed to do because I have so many local and remote mapped drives that I had run out of available letters of the alphabet. I have many drives on my system, and the driv eletter architecture is a fundamental limitation of Windows (which I will expound upon in some future blog post).
Luckily I was able to copy everything I needed across to the new hard disk, and now the old disk is just a paperweight.
Next I performed a normal a Windows uninstall of Notes 8.5.3 (via Programs and Features), which I expected would removed all vestiges of Notes 8.5.3 from the system.
But I was wrong. Apparently the Notes 9.0.1 installer was still expecting to find stuff in the original G:\Notes853 folder [on the now non-existent G: drive]. It seems that this caused the Notes 9.0.3 installation to fail because led when iG:\Notes853 couldn't be found. The misleading message “RCP Base plug-in not found” unfortunately did nothing to assist with error diagnosis.
Anyway, following the clue reported by the NICE tool, I carried out some judicious (but very tedious) manual editing of the Windows registry, changing the many references of the original Notes 8.5.3 installation from G:\Notes853 to E:\G\Notes853 and at last the Notes 9.0.1 installation ran to completion..
Weak programming, IBM. Any "not found" error message like this should always indicate where the desired object(s) were being looked for. If the error had said "“RCP Base plug-in not found in folder G:\Notes853 folder” then I would have understood and fixed the problem right away.
I have always enjoyed using notes but this new version 9.01 is a pita to install 5 times have download it and tried to install and each time it fails at the very last setup i tried the NICE program but it do-sent find anything to fix so in a last ditch attempt to run this app i did a wipe and tried it again, the error i get is
ReplyDelete---------------------------
IBM Notes 9.0.1 Social Edition
---------------------------
Verifying: "com.ibm.opensocial.sapi.feature_9.0.1.20131022-1058"
Unexpected results have occurred during the provisioning operation.
For additional information, please refer to the logs:
c:\Program Files (x86)\IBM\Notes\Data\workspace\logs
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------
so any ideas on how to fix this or do i just go back to using Lotus notes R5
sorry.. posted it as a comment before but.. I've seen similar posts where the local AV locked some files and therefore the installation did not succeed. If you have an AV on your machine, can you disable it and try another setup please. If that doesn't work, can you share the current log from the folder mentioned in the error?
DeleteHello, RJ. ... I can't shed any light on the situation, but have posted the following Mayday request on your behalf:
ReplyDeletehttp://notestoneunturned.blogspot.com.au/2016/02/please-help-this-user-to-install-ibm.html
This will be seen by the Notes community at Planet Lotus, and hopefully you'll get a solution from the community.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete