My session at CollabSphere 2021 on installing Sametime 11.6

Yesterday I gave a session at CollabSphere 2021 on installing a complete Sametime system, chat + meetings.

If you are interested the video is available here until the end of November. But if you want a faster way to learn what I showed, rather than watching 45 minutes of me talking you should go here and grab the great presentation that my fellow HCL Ambassador Ales Lichtenberg created. Though that one is for 11.5, the installation is the same for 11.6 so is a very good step-by-step guide you can use if you want to install Sametime Meeting on Docker.

Those who followed my session will remember that I challenged the Demo Gods and did a live demo rather than a presentation, knowing full well that you should never do that, because Murphy’s Law applies and so something will surely go wrong 🙂

For me the the hiccup was at the end; the installation of Community server was OK, and I could show it working, the Meeting server installed correctly but when I showed how to connect to it, the browser gave me an error. Obviously I tested that setup at least five times before the event and it always worked……

I did not disable the local firewall on my Linux box. For a demo you should always do that (easier than configuring it properly) and this could have been the cause, but after the event I tried again and got the same error.

Guess what it was ? When I fired up my VM with the Linux box, it changed IP address!!!! I did not set manually a static IP, but left the default automatic, so while it used the same address 192.168.1.91 in all the tests that I did, the day I did the live demo it changed to 192.168.1.93 🙁
Obviously I had the .91 address in my host file so is not a surprise that I got a connection error.

Note to self: always use fixed IP addresses in demo systems.

Apologies to those who followed my session for this silly mistake.