Summary

Your boss asks you to upgrade the Quickr 8.0.0.2 server in the Asia-Pacific region to 8.2. So you roll up your sleeves and get to work on upgrading the server. The installation goes somewhat smoothly (I hadn’t checked … some of the installation files had not copied across correctly) but when you try to install the latest Hot Fixes for Lotus Quickr 8.2 … the Hot Fix installer just freezes.

You then try to run the Hot Fix installer from the command prompt and you get a bit more information … the installer fails because of this reason:

Exception in thread “main” java.lang.Exception: Notes initialization failure – err 421 

Oh yeah … that’s a nice error message … very cryptic and easy to read. I just love those. Oddly enough, the Hot Fix installation went super well on the 2 other servers … so why does it kick and scream on this server?

Solution

After a Google or two … nothing much comes up. However, I do come across this post which talks about the location of the notes.ini causing this error in apps using Java to create Notes Sessions.

So, that got me thinking … this particular server that I am/was upgrading is a half-baked partitioned server experiment by the former system administrator that went horribly wrong somewhere down the line. When I look for Data folder, I see lots of old, unused “partitions”. In fact, the only partition that works is the one for the Lotus Quickr server. And, as you probably know, because of how partitioned servers work, each server has its notes.ini in their own data directory.

That realization hit me like a brick because the Quickr Hot Fix documentation makes it crystal clear: the directory where the ini file of the server is located *must* be in the PATH environment variable. They don’t talk about partitioned server in the Hot Fix documentation but I had a hunch that it applied to those as well. 

And a couple clicks later in the Windows screens, I had the path modified. I then rebooted and presto … the Hot Fix installer worked like a charm.

This is pretty basic stuff but maybe someone out there will eventually benefit from this information … happy Hot Fixing.