Blog

Posted on

Tidying the blog

Today I decided to tidy my blog and to try and make a bit of sense out of all the *stuff* I throw up on this site ..

That is throw up as in post .. not as in .. well you know what I meen …

Anyways after much hacking and slashing at php files, creating new templates for pages, new side bars for said pages and eventually getting my head around functions again, I think I have myself organised.

The SocialShazza site now has two main topics .. Technology and Disney.

All of the Disney stuff can be found under the Disney heading, and all of the Connections related things can be found under the connections heading.
All blog posts will still appear on the front page, but I have made category pages for Disney and Connections to appear under their menus.

This means I can now highlight awesome new stuff like Paul and Gab’s Connections 101 and people can find it easily 🙂

I am hoping now that will mean that things will be easier to read and find here – although I am open to suggestions on keeping it tidy 😉 and that much of the Disney will be filtered out for those weirdo’s that don’t “Do” Disney – and for those of you that do all the wonderful Disney goodness is all in one place for you now 🙂

as Tigger would say TTFN – ta ta for now 😉

 
Sorry I couldn’t help myself

Posted on

Connections fix pack 3.0.1.1 now available

At last Connections fix pack 3.0.1.1 is now available to download and fixes lots of little issues, including the firefox feature with files and wikis and the issue chrome has with files.

I installed it on my test system yesterday and it went very smoothly.

The fix pack can be downloaded from Fix Central. Fix ID is: ​3.0.1.0-LC-Multi-FP001​

The Fixpack is installed using the IBM installation manger (IM).

It was very straight forward – basic steps are as follows

Download the fixpack zip file

Stop the Connections WAS servers, but leave the Deployment manager and Nodeagent servers running

Start the IBM installation manager

From the installer manager menu , click File -> Preferences

Add a repository (if you have used eclipse or RAD (Rational Application Developer)  / WSAD (WebSphere Application Developer) in the past you will be familiar with these steps)

Point the repository path to the full path of the fixpack zip file and click ok

If there is an issue connecting to the repository the IM will let you know at this point.

Click update and follow to the guide to install the fix pack – ensure all applications are selected and enter a valid wasadmin user name and password.

Review the summary information. Click Back to change the information or click Update to install the selected fix packs.​
​
When the installation is complete, synchronize all the nodes and restart all the clusters

 

As ever please review the full technote / read me which can be found here

 

IBM are making these fixes easier and easier for people without a huge amount of WebSphere / Connections knowledge to install – good on them.

 

I am very impressed with all the improvements I have seen over the past 3 or 4 years around fixes and fix packs – IBM has come along way since I first started “mucking about with WebSphere” 11 years ago.

Posted on

A fix for the Chrome header issue

Stuart blogged back in January about a known issue with downloading files from the files application using Chrome.

chromeIssue

IBM do not officially support Chrome with Connections 3.0.1 – but our good friend & IBM Champion Sjaak Ursinus has devised a work around.

Header edit Content-Disposition ^(.*)creation-date=(.*);\smodification-date=(.*);$ “$1creation-date=\”$2\”; modification-date=\”$3\”;”

ensure the mod_header module is uncommented httpd.conf

save and close the file.

Restart the HTTP server to pick up the change

Sjaak’s full explanation can be found on the Connections Forum

Posted on

Issue with custom themes and communities

I have had a PMR open for some time relating to a bit of a known issue with Custom themes and Connections communties

There was an issue where you would create a custom theme


In my case I also customised the coloured community themes also

When clicking on forums, blogs etc the theme was stripped out displaying

It appears there was a step missing from the wiki!!

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lcwiki.nsf/dx/Defining_a_community_theme_ic301

Step 1.d – d. Remove the file theme.css from the corporateTheme directory

In my case I had based my custom theme on the default theme and had used it as the default Community theme (which has no theme.css), so all communities with the default theme appeared correctly.

BUT, I had also lightly customised the coloured community themes – removing (or renaming) the theme.css from each coloured theme has resolved the issue.

Thank you mr Kieran Reid for investigating and confirming this was the issue.

Posted on

Issue with Connections media widget timing out

Whilst building a new Connections environment for a customer we noticed a strange issue when uploading large files to the media gallery.

Initially I thought it was related to the size of the file, but the same file will upload to the Connections files application without issue. There is very little errors in the SystemOut.log for the Connections server, so I was baffled.

A PMR was opened and the very helpful Mr Dave McCarthy was the PMR owner and we then started on our investigation. During the testing I noticed that the uploads appeared to timeout after 20 mins, exactly 20 mins. After some experimenting on 4 different Connections systems, it was confirmed that it was a timeout, reguardless of the file policy or file library size. So not many people are on a intenet connection that may take 20 mins to upload a video, but we know it is an issue as the customer I was building the system for confirmed this.

After much digging through existing PMRs Dave was stummped, so the PMR was passed up the chain to the development team. Who confirmed very quickly that their is a setting in the config.js which is burried in the news ear file which has a time out set to 1200 sec (20 minutes)!! Change this setting and as if by magic the timeout issue is resolved.

To change the time out setting do the following :

/installedApps//News.ear/qkr.lw.war/WEB-INF/pages/js/config.js

Find this section, (Line 450), that specifies some timeout values,
including one for upload that is set to 1200 sec (20 minutes):

timeout: {
request: 60,
update: 200,
upload: 1200,
retrieveFiles: 100,
userSearch: 200,
userTypeahead: 10
},

Raise the upload value from 1200 to what is needed to complete the large file upload on your connection speed and save the file. Then restart the News application to make the change effective. This file should be changed on the primary Connections node if you have more than one and sync the changes around the other nodes.

Posted on

Connections demo from the Lotusphere OGS

As kindly shared by Mr Luis Benitez, the portion of the Lotusphere 2012 OGS of the lovely Suzanne Livingston demoing what is coming in IBM Connections version 4 and beyond.

For those of you who didn’t managed to catch it live or on the OGS replay – if you are interested in Connections it is a must watch.

More information about the newest version of Connections will be available at the next Social Connections user group – see socialconnections.info for more details.

Posted on

Locked down doesn’t mean locked out

Over the past few days I have been installing a Connections environment in a locked down windows environment with a very agressive group policy.

Which was a lot more locked down than I expected it to be, so here are a few gotchas that I discovered that may assist you if you are in the same situation.

In this scenario we were using 3 machines:

machine 1 – DB2, TDI and Domino (for LDAP)

machine 2 – Connections (Deployment manger and Connections node)

machine 3 – HTTP server

DB2

The Group Policy would only allow the db2admin user to do anything DB related. For the databases to install and function correctly I had to follow these steps.

Create the db2admin and lcuser accounts as a local machine admin, logon as the db2admin to install and configure db2, be logged on as the db2admin user to use the connections db creation wizard (it would work as another user to create them but all the grants failed) – normally I would add my machine admin account to the corrrect db2 groups, but the windows policy was not playing ball.

Once db2 is installed and the Connections dbs created the only users with access to the dbs are db2admin and lcuser – regardless of the users that were placed in the db2 windows groups – to query the DBs you must connect to the db with either of the valid users.

TDI

Appeared to work correctly (thank you TDI)  – but I did find the issue in my previous post that if you use TDI 7.1 and then downgrade the connections wizards don’t work as expected.

HTTP Server

Installed as expected, but there were a few issues with communicating with the deployment manager.

Connections

Connections installed as expected, but took a long time, longer than normal.

Ports and other considerations

Pass the coms team / firewall team – whomever looks after such things a copy of the WebSphere plugin file and ask them to open all ports listed between HTTP and Depolyment manager machine, also port 8008 should be opened up for HTTP Admin.

Becuase of issues between the HTTP server and Dmgr/Connections machine, the news application was not mapped properly and plugin did not generate. This caused issues with the news app, which manifested itself with recomendations widgets, media gallery widgets and who do i know widgets throwing errors (no errors in the system out log) – after checking the http server error log, I found it was trying to serve news up from the webserver, after checking the plugin news wasn’t mapped.

This was easily resolved by remapping the news app to the webserver, regenerating and propagating the plugin file.

The Connections machine itself requires access to the internet for RSS feeds – if the machine can’t get out it can not retrieve RSS feeds and will give a nasty error.

It was a little challanging, especially when you have to justify every port, but once I spent 5 mins explaining how the environment hangs together and what the ports are required for it was no problem at all.

No doubt I shall be using this blog post to remind me of what needs to be opened up when I hit this issue again  🙂

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on

Weird issue with TDI Connections Wizards

I noticed a weird issue with the TDI Connections population wizard today.

Originally we had TDI 7.1 installed for some specific issue that were addressed when synching different LDAPs together – that worked, the connections population wizard and all the scripts worked a treat (good news if you want to use TDI 7.1)

Now due to one thing and another we took TDI 7.1 off and put TDI 7.0.0.5 back on the machine – BUT if you do not replace the Connections Wizards directory you will get issues.

The GUI DB population wizard runs, everything looks good, you can fill all the info in it will do things, but then reports zero records added – build sucessful !! I was puzzled, I could connect to the LDAP ok – an LDAP search reports back ok, DB connections are all ok – what is going on.

The main issue is once you have run the wizard over a TDI 7.1 install the derby DB inside the wizards directory updates to a newer version. If you then downgrade TDI and run the same population wizard TDI throws an error as soon as it attempts to iterate at all as it can not read the internal derby DB – reporting it is at a newer version and is not compatible.

The only reason I discovered this was to run the collect_dns job and watch the TDI log. If you tail the TDI log from the wizard, becuase it runs multiple jobs and they wizz past bt so quickly you can not catch the error!!

So its an easy fix – delete the exising wizards directory and re-extract it and attempt again – and of course it will work.

I am guessing the moral of the story is use TDI 7.0.0.5 unless you HAVE to use 7.1 and try not to have to roll it back 🙂

 

 

 

 

Posted on

Lotusphere Saturday 14 Jan

After a not bad nights sleep, I was up at 7 and off to breakfast at 8 with Mick Moignard.
Disney do lay on a good breakfast and I  enjoyed my eggs and bacon followed by mickey mouse head pancakes 🙂
After breakfast I met up with Darren & Stuart and wandered outside to see part of the annual hog ride.
Our community has a few bikers so Paul Mooney, Bill Buchen etc. organise a hig ride on saturday & sunday. Hire a bike and see Orlando.
Stu headed off to do his outlet shopping so I grabbed myself a Dazza, we bought a day park ticket each and headed off to Disney Hollywood studios. We caught up with Sam & Mike and the others  and hung out inthe park for a few hours.
Muppets were seen ( darren does a fantastic swedish chef), scary rides were ridden (but not buy me) & star tours ride 3 times was awseome. You will notice in this pic of us outside the Tower of Terror below that I am loaded with coats and bags and jumpers – this is becuase the metal people went on ToT to drop in an elevator and sensible me went to ride star tours (again)
After 4 and a bit hours of fun, Darren and I said good bye to the other guys about 3 and headed back tothe boardwalk via a mickey mouse ice cream.
Once back at the boadwalk we headed for Big River Grill where B.A.L.D ( bloggers annual get together) takes place.
We said hello to loads of people, caught up with the yellow legend that is Mat Newman – which of course involved a Tim Tam Slam  and finally ate a real meal.
I caught up with some old friends and made some new ones – we have a great community. The usual plan after BALD is to head to the espn bar where the Turtle has a get together – due to much sport occuring they were not admitting anyone else, so we  headed over to a favourite haunt Kimonos.
Kevin had only just arrived and missed dinner & we finally caught up with Femke, so they had sushi – much more chat was had, catching up isn’t a huge thing as we talk almost everyday on skype so the conversation turns to Lotusphere, Karaoke and software ( an ocasional reference to an iseries or power system may have occured too) 🙂
After Kimonos we wandered out to the dolphin lobby bar – chilled out on the sofas and chatted some more, all in all a good start to setting up a busy week
Posted on

Lotusphere Friday 13 Jan

Friday is a bit of a blur.
I got to the airport met up with My friends Sam & Mike, their son luke, and 2 of sam’s sisters (yn & charlie) who were going to Orlando as they were getting maried on Monday 23rd January.
I also bumped into mr Paul Withers and his wife and the Cardiff boys.
Once at the gate it was like a reunion, lots of community people heading out to orlando for the annual pilgrimage 🙂
The flight was good, watched movies, ate food, drank juice & generally tried to chill.
When we finally got to MCO it all started to go wrong.
Our plane was late, so it arrived the same timevas 2 others and it took me 2 hours to get through immigration.
By that time pretty much everyone else was through. Thank the maker fellow brit (and witer for domino power magazine) Mick Moignard waited for me.
By the time we’d collected baggage etc the Virgin holidays bus had left without us – if Mick hadn’t waited I would have been on my own! After much grumbling and cussing the Virgin Holidays rep we jumped in a cab.
It was just a 20 minute journey to the Swan /Dolphin resort and it was great to catch up with Mick and have a good old chat.
Once at the Swan it was check-in and quickly unpack. I also had the quickest shower known to man (or woman) as 9 hours on a plane is kind of sticky.
Then went to meet Stuart, Lisa and Darren. We headed out for some food at the Big River Grill which was exactly what I needed. Much chat about what we were hoping to get from the week was had. I then stumbled back to my room for some much needed rest.