Inside Documentum

It seems that a few people (myself included) have had the inevitable problems with installing this initial release of D6. Many of the problems seem to relate to the packaging of weblogic as the new app server for the JMS (previously Tomcat).

It is useful to look for a few log files when trying to troubleshoot this problem. The logs for the weblogic install go in %DM_HOME%\logs\install (at least on a Windows install) and the file structure for a successful installation looks like this:

If you click on the weblogic folder you should get the following structure:

I would first of all check the file install.log in the weblogic folder. It should show some thing like:

STDOUT: Extracting 0%…………………………………………………………………………………………..100%

Clearly the first step the installer takes is to extract/unzip the weblogic installation package. The extraction appears to occur to the current working directory. When I tried invoking the installation from a network drive without write permission the installation proceeded happily until the weblogic installation. Then it just hung around for ages showing a progress bar that crept up to 100% and then went no further. Viewing the weblogic/install.log showed only:

STDOUT: Extracting 0%

which is what makes me think that the extraction was targetted at the non-writable network drive resulting in failure.

Assuming the installation gets this far but you still have problems then it is worth examining the other log files, probably in the date /time order you see on the directories here.