Fix-Script for Lotus Notes 8.x/ 8.5.x Installation on Citrix/Terminal Services Servers

Daniel Nashed  2 June 2009 08:25:44

The installer in Notes 8.x and 8.5 is not Citrix aware and if you install the Notes Client on Citrix -- Specially when you apply MUI Packs for international languages you run into issues.
There are several descriptions in multiple technotes and there is also a description in the Citrix whitepaper.
Based on all this information and his own experience and testing in the field Christian wrote a VB script to automate the settings needed.
All this information has been send to IBM for feedback for 8.5.1 and there are plans to make the installer Citrix aware.
Meanwhile Christian's script is a great help to make your life easier when installing the Notes Client in a Citrix environment.

Here is Christian's short description and the script.

Huge thanks to Christian to share it with the community!!!

-- Daniel



 
VBScript was used, so no MSI packaging knowhow or a commercial/full version of packaging software is needed. 
The script is intended to fix Installation errors of Lotus Notes 8.5.x and 8.0.x releases. 
In the current version, no upgrades are supported! 
The script is intended to run on new Lotus Notes installations. 
It will create a new notes.ini, custom notes.ini entries won't be preserved

In addition, some recommended settings of the whitepaper "IBM® Lotus® Notes® 8.5 on Citrix XenApp 4.5: A scalability analysis" are set. 
It works with Single User and Multi User Installations and all Standard Client MUI Packs (G1, G2a, G2b, G3). 
The script is trying to figure out the correct settings by analyzing various files and registry settings, so nearly nothing is hardcoded. 
It builds a correct default notes.ini and adds DEBUG_GLOBAL_NAMESPACE_DISABLE=1.
It will delete the corrupt notes.ini files created by the Notes Installer. 
The notes.ini created by the script will be created in %AllUsersProfile%\Application Data\Lotus\Notes\data for Multi User Installations, for Single User installations, the notes.ini is created in the data directory, not the program directory.

The corresponding MUI.DAT file is always created in the MUIFOLDER directory (C:\Program Files\IBM\Lotus\Notes\MUI by default). 
It is assumed that the final 8.5.1 version will use "8.5.1" as version string. 
The script tries to identify the installed languages and adds the corresponding entries to the MUI.DAT file. 
In version 1.0.0 the ReplaceLanguage parameter and REPL_ parameter ignored.

The script corrects HKCU\software\Lotus\notes\installer\vdir_ini for both kinds of installations, for Multi User installations, it corrects the MultiUser and DataPath values in the registry (HKLM\Software\Lotus\Notes\, too.

If a Multi User installation is found, the script moves the directory domino\icons to the correct location and deletes the empty PROGDIR\data directory (Known bug: only if Notes was installed to the default location) 
The directory %AllUsersProfile%\Application Data\Lotus\Notes\Data\Shared\workspace will be deleted after the files were move to the correct location.

The script is able to find the Java base directory and modifies the jvm.properties file as prosposed in the whitepaper, jvm.shareclasses.loc will be set to %Systemroot%\:/temp/xpdplat.

Finally, the script stops and deletes the services "Lotus Notes Diagnostics" and "Multi-User Cleanup service".

For further details see the comments in the script itself.

I'd like to thank Peter Birett and Daniel Nashed for their help and suggestions! :-)

Best Regards 
Christian 

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