Resolving the Lotus Traveler “Connection to database ntsdb unable to be made” error

Andre Horak — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 22:22:26 +0000

After restarting an IBM Domino server running on Linux recently, the Lotus Traveler service failed to start, giving the following error message:

Lotus Traveler: SEVERE *system Connection to database ntsdb unable to be made. Verify that you have properly created the remote database.

IBM Domino Version: 8.5.2FP1

Traveler Version: 8.5.2.1 Build 201012031608

All the posts I found online suggested that either restarting the IBM Domino server, or the entire Linux server would resolve the issue. I first tried restarting only the IBM Domino server, but the problem persisted. I then tried restarting the entire server as the posts suggested, also without success.

This post proved to be the most helpful in my case:

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21586728

I moved the ntsdb folder to a temporary location and reinstall Lotus Traveler. After the installation process had successfully completed, I started the IBM Domino server and the Lotus Traveler service loaded successfully.

Initially, tell traveler showusers only listed 1 registered user, but the longer the server was running, the more users were listed when running this command. I could also see active synchronisation activities when running the tell traveler showactive console command.

ISPConfig 3, WordPress, and Clean URL’s

Andre Horak — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 18:07:37 +0000

So I spent my whole Friday afternoon (and a good part of this evening) trying to make our brand new WordPress Blog Site work with Pretty Permalinks (a.k.a. Clean URL’s). Various searches on Google with all keyword combinations I could think of rendered no workable solution. In the end, the solution was simple. But as they say: Brain surgery is easy if you know how!

Firstly, I confirmed that MOD_REWRITE was installed and active. To do this, issue the following command from the command prompt on the ISPConfig server:

# apache2ctl -t -D DUMP_MODULES

This returned a list of results, one of them being:

rewrite_module (shared)

Great! So the rewrite module is up and running.

Next, I added the following to the WordPress site’s “Apache directives” in ISPConfig:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Lastly, and this is the one that kept me busy for a while, you change the “Redirect type” in the “Redirect”-tab in ISPConfig from “No Redirect” to “L”.

Now just restart Apache2 and you are good to go!

I hope this saves someone the trouble of having to try and figure this out on a Friday night. At least I had a couple of cold beers and the sound of the ocean in the background to keep me motivated.