As part of a project skilling up on Xpages I wanted to standardise development servers and development environment and took Domino and Notes 9.0.1FP2 as the place to start from. However things were not just as straightforward as it seemed so here’s what we found – hoping that it helps someone else to update/upgrade to the latest and greatest for their Xpages platform.
The first issue was that the server in question was actually running 9.0.0. The fix packs don’t actually spell out that the version of Domino needs to be 9.0.1 for them to install. So how do you get from 9.0.0 to 9.0.1 ?
Logically you would think that installing using the 900MB 9.0.1 windows executable should take care of that- but we noticed that although the install claimed to have completed successfully it showed a message stating “Java Virtual Machine Failed To Start”. Applying the two fix packs will also say that they updated successfully but that the JVM is not updated !
So what do you do ? In this case you have to go backwards before you go forwards. As always backup any data (for example the data folder) before trying anything major. In our scenario we removed Domino from the machine and then installed 9.00 – then 9.0.1 and the two fix packs. In between each upgrade / update – start the domino server – check the version and check for any errors. In our instance there were none.
You could in all likelihood miss the 9.0.0 install and go for 9.0.1.
The other side of the updates was on the client side where we had the experience of Notes hanging at the “loading” stage after the fix packs were installed to a 9.0.1 client. However the same logic was used and after killing the notes processes we removed and reinstalled the 9.0.1 base before successfully applying the 2 fix packs.
So hopefully you get the same results when bringing your development environment up to spec. Not sure why this particular update was as problematic – in the past domino and notes updates have been much less difficult