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so I DID make it to Connect

So thanks to some very good fortune and help from an old and awesome friend I was able to make the Connect conference in Orlando last week.

I will post my full round up later in the week – but the highlights

The Good

  • SPEAKING for the first time with my good friend Christoph Stoettner  I am not ashamed to say I was extremely nervous about speaking at Connect for the first time, but if I have the opportunity to do so again I will grab it with both hands
  • The flow for the first two days with Jay Bayer hosting the opening sessions, flowed really well, he followed the twitter stream and was interacting as we went along.
  • Craig Hayman the new ICS head honcho wearing yellow sneakers when he came on stage got a massive roar of approval from the Champions den.
  • The Champions den was great again – thanks to those who run the program for looking after us for the week, for the breakfasts with the IBMers, for the lunches, for the opportunity to hang out with the cool kids.
  • The newly revamped Design Studio (UX lab) spent a good few hours giving feedback, and checking on some things I spent time on 2 years ago to find they have improved a billion %
  • Closing General Session – stroke of Genius .. Mars Rover, Nasa dude, room full of geeks  – best CGS ever – thank you IBM

The Bad

  • Lack of technical info in the OGS – even though I am still a newbie to this conference (this was my 4th year), it has got worse in the 4 years I have been attending. The demo’s are generally awesome .. but we have little or no idea what makes up the demos. I don’t expect a full break down but a slide with an overview that the segment of the demo for instance may contain Connections and Sametime with domino as the back end mail system would be enough to suffice – Customers, HR people, our bosses and less technical types may see that demo and say *WE NEED THAT* – wouldn’t it be great if we knew what *that* was made up of 🙂 I know the OGS is for the press and marketing people etc, but a small pander to the technical community would go a long long way.
  • There seem to be a loss less late night socialising this time round, maybe we are getting older, maybe we were tired because the days felt fuller – its not too much of a bad thing from a sleep perspective but it was from a spending time with people perspective – there are so many in our ICS community that I only see once or twice a year, just wish I had more time with you.
  • Some of the session scheduling was a bit crazy – even with re-runs there were 2 I wanted to make but missed, its hard to jam all the great sessions in the 4 days, but sometimes it seemed that there was Connections sessions up against other Connections sessions and Domino against Domino when they may have been a bit more staggered – just my opinion – may be it was my bad scheduling.

  • I didn’t make it to any BOFs this year 🙁 again that was bad scheduling on my part.

  • I also missed the Great Geek Challenge as I wasn’t feeling great – gutted as it sounded like so much fun (as it always is) 

The Ugly

  • Well there wasn’t much ugly to be honest .. they could have done a better job with the staff shirts, but they were a lovely shade of blue 🙂

 

Full round up coming soon – we have the best community on the planet (or Mars 😉 )

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Alas I will not be at Connect this year

Due to circumstances out of my control, I will not make the IBM Connect conference this year.

To say I am devastated would be an understatement – as I was due to speak with my friend Christoph.

I will miss the great sessions, the opportunity to catch up with remote colleges, visit the user experience lab (which I have done every year I have been), chat with the product managers and developers and participate in the Champion activities.

I will mostly miss catching up with the great people of this community, the networking, the meeting new people, making new friends and seeing the people I only get to see once a year.

I am absolutely gutted 🙁 I hope everyone that is going has a good time and I will be watching twitter for the updates on what is going on

 

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Speaking at Connect 2014 what an honor

It is an honor and a privilege to have been chosen with my friend and community peer Christoph Stoettner to speak at this years Connect / Lotusphere conference.

This will be the 4th Connect / Lotusphere I have attended but the first I have spoken a full session at – in previous years I have helped run a BOF and have spoken at speedgeeking.

We will be speaking in the Best Practices track, sharing our admin and scripting tips and tricks to help make a Connections Admin’s day a little easier 🙂

Screen Shot 2013-11-26 at 12.58.57The full article can be found here on the IBM social insights blog

See you in Orlando 🙂

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mod_deflate compressing your Connections pages before they hit the client

I have also posted this over on the Cube Soft Blog
The Apache v2 module mod_deflate is extremely handy if you are serving IBM Connections up to remote locations with little bandwidth. Some of the Connections pages have large css or java script files that are required to function correctly but for countries that have poor connection to the remote server this causes slow page load times and sometimes timeouts.

So mod_deflate to the rescue ..

open your httpd.conf file and ensure that the mod_deflate is uncommented

LoadModule deflate_module modules/mod_deflate.so

just before section 3 for virtual hosts – add the following

## set deflate

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
# Netscape 4.x has some problems…
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
# BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# NOTE: Due to a bug in mod_setenvif up to Apache 2.0.48
# the above regex won’t work. You can use the following
# workaround to get the desired effect:
BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don’t compress already-compressed files
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .(?:exe|t?gz|zip|bz2|sit|rar)$ no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .(?:avi|mov|mp3|mp4|rm|flv|swf|mp?g)$ no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .pdf$ no-gzip dont-vary
DeflateCompressionLevel 9

### Section 3: Virtual Hosts

Note – I have the DeflateCompressionLevel set to 9 – this is the highest amount of compression. Depending on the load and size of your HTTP server this may use a lots of CPU time to deflate, this may need to be monitored and tuned for your specific server

Inside the virtual host for the secure Connections server add the same deflate directive (see example below)


ServerName yourservername.com
SSLEnable
Include “/opt/IBM/HTTPServer/conf/rewrite.conf”
Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin “*”
## set deflate

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
# Netscape 4.x has some problems…
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
# BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# NOTE: Due to a bug in mod_setenvif up to Apache 2.0.48
# the above regex won’t work. You can use the following
# workaround to get the desired effect:
BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don’t compress already-compressed files
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .(?:exe|t?gz|zip|bz2|sit|rar)$ no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .(?:avi|mov|mp3|mp4|rm|flv|swf|mp?g)$ no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .pdf$ no-gzip dont-vary
DeflateCompressionLevel 9

restart the HTTP server and the deflate module will be active

You can test the compression by visiting http://www.whatsmyip.org/http_compression/ and enter a url of a Connections page

For instance I put the profiles page of a customer’s server here that mod_deflate is enabled and the compression was a massive 67.4%

Original Size: 7.27 KB
Compressed Size: 2.37 KB
Data Savings: 67.4%

So all in all if you have sites that are in bandwidth starved places – mod_deflate is worth taking a look at.

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Screen for linux how did I not know about this

thanks to my friend Gabriella Davis for the heads up on this awesome linux tool

I was having issues with the Sametime TURN server timing out due to my linux session dying or timing out and Gab suggested to look up the screen command.

It is a simple yet affective tool which is implemented usually by default on a linux server that allows you to reconnect to a screen initiated session

you simply enter the command screen from your linux servers command line – the remote session may look like nothing has happened but you are now connected via screen.

carry on as you would normally – if you are disconnected or timed out – log back on the remote linux machine and enter the command screen -ls

[root@myserver bin]# screen -ls
There is a screen on:
        25755.pts-0.myserver       (Detached)
1 Socket in /var/run/screen/S-root.

 

to reconnect the session enter the command

screen -r session info

for example

screen -r 25755.pts-0.myserver

and you are reconnected

if you want to exit the screen session type exit and you will see [screen is terminating]

Excellent little tool .. thanks again Gabriella for the heads up on this 🙂

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ConnCtrl bash script for IBM Connections

I have also blogged this over on the Cube Soft company blog – with my good friend <a href=”http://twitter.com/TimsterC” title=”TimsterC” target=”_blank”>Mr Tim Clark</a> we have created a script for starting and stopping IBM Connections on Red Hat (RHEL)

 

The script has a bunch of variables to allow you to input the path to the WebSphere deployment manager and nodes, and a place to enter the names of your Connections servers.

Please visit Tim’s blog for all the information and to download the script.

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Connections 4.0 cr issues when you have a shared data folder not on the WAS server

We have spotted a lovely issue with patching Connections 4 to CR2 and above when using a < connections path > /data/shared folder on anything other than a single WAS node.

For example in a standard one node connections install the < connections path > /data/shared folder is on the same machine as the connections instance .. in a multi-node instance the shared data folder is normally on a san / network share.

In my instance the shared data was on a RHEL nfs share that was mapped to the node machines as a filesystem, we had seen no issue with this at all, until we attempted to update the Connections version 4.0 instance to CR4 – the CR4 updates installed correctly but on starting the connections servers up, the news feed and a lot of the widget data was not displaying correctly – throwing a javascript error!! I was stumped, I had seen this before, this particular instance is owned and run by a non root user, when the instances are started as root the permissions are not set correctly and it throws an error.

This was not the case here. The non root user owned all the files and had started the Connections servers, so it should work. There appeared to be no obvious errors in the SystemOut logs for the servers.

Flummoxed by this – I rolled the patches off, at Connections 4.0 again restarted the servers and it worked correctly.

Convinced there may be an issue in CR4 I decided to attempt CR2, so later on in the week had another attempt at patching. Stuart was also doing some maintenance on another customer machine at the same time so we worked through it together. Once the CR2 patches were installed correctly we saw the same issue. So with Stuart checking the errors thrown and I checking the logs and a fiddler trace we managed to deduce that when the fix packs were applying , the wrong webresources directory was being updated.

Under < connections path > /data/shared/provision/webresources on the local machine – all the files had been updated with the new fix pack files NOT the actual shared data folder on the network share. The WebSphere variable for the instance has the correct folder mapped and all the other files from the /data/shared folder are being served correctly.

The quick resolution to this was to delete all the files under the networked share folder /provision/webresources and copy the files from the local machine /data/shared/provision/webresources – restart the servers and as if by magic it works.

IBM have acknowledged that this is an issue and hopefully we wont see this issue again .. but IF you see something similar and you have a shared folder that is not on your connections machine – check to ensure the correct set of files has been updated.

Yet another one of those *fun* fixes – hope it helps someone else save some pain

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Connections 4.x search – well that was a weird problem

If you have migrated or moved an IBM Connections instance from 3.0.1 > 4.x (either 4.0 or 4.5) or moved data between 4.x servers you may have noticed a weird issue with searching, especially around communities.

The reason I have been a bit quiet on the blog of late is because I am working on a few Connections projects many of which have involved migrating data between test and live servers or replicating data between servers. I have come across a few issues relating to search so I thought I would share them to save you guys the pain.

Everyone knows when you migrate or move data between servers you should clear the scheduled tasks and rebuild the search indexes – but in V4.x a new set of search data came in for Community searching – the catalog.

When the search task runs is collects a bunch of information about communities for the lists you see under the my communities tab and public communities – it collects this in the catalog.

The issues I was seeing was that all historical data regarding Community membership and Public communities was not being shown and that is because of the catalog.

There are a couple of places that catalog data is stored and you can check this by looking up the WebSphere variables :

CATALOG_INDEX_DIR
CATALOG_REPLICATION_DIR

Typically CATALOG_INDEX_DIR is stored in < Connections install > /data/local/catalog/index

and CATALOG_REPLICATION_DIR is stored in < Connections install > /data/shared/catalog/indexReplication

there is also a temporary folder in your os tmp directory called indexCreationDir in the case of most linux systems it is /tmp/indexCreationDir

When you run your data migration and delete the search index under < Connections install > data/local/search ( I normally rename the index folder to #index)

also rename or remove the Places folder under < Connections install >/data/local/catalog/index/ and < Connections install > /data/shared/catalog/indexReplication and remove or rename the /tmp/indexCreationDir

once you restart Connections run an index now to rebuild the indexes, seedlist and the catalog data and your search will function as expected.

for example:

execfile(“searchAdmin.py”)

SearchService.indexNow(“activities, blogs, calendar, communities, dogear, files, forums, profiles, status_updates, wikis”)

 

I am sure that our resident Community script guru (Mr Christoph Stoettner) could script clearing these but for now its a manual process – hope this will save you some head aches on upgrades and migrations 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

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Issues with Install manager GUI on RHEL 6.3 ?

If you are attempting to install Connecitons 4.5 on RHEL 6.3 you will have noticed that there is an issue with using the GUI for the IBM Installation Manager with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3

The IM won’t fire up a GUI even though xterm works for other GUI’s on the machine, no errors, no splash screen, no nothing !!

It has been driving both Stuart and I bonkers .. after a lot of digging here is what you need to get it to work :

yum install gtk2.i686 gtk2-engines.i686 PackageKit-gtk-module.i686 PackageKit-gtk-module.x86_64 libcanberra-gtk2.x86_64 libcanberra-gtk2.i686

I ran this and hey presto a splash screen …

So to save your pain .. install the gtk2 packages above 🙂

Happy installing

 

 

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Sorry for the radio silence ….

I want to apologise for my lack of blogging and tweeting – there has been a lot of ups and downs in my personal life over the last 10 months, serious injury which is still not totally resolved and a bunch of other things that have contributed to not only my lack of blogging – but has stopped me attending and speaking at LUGs.

I would like to think that I may be over the worst of it – I had a fantastic holiday with my daughter Emily in Feb 2013 to Disney World, I am working with some great people (thank you Stuart, Warren and especially Tim who has been awesome), so I now need to give myself a kick up the arse to get back into the swing of things.

I was due to present at BLUG on administering Connections and its associated software – I will get that presentation finished and posted at some point.

I have thrown myself into work and am working on a project that involves my favourite thing – INTEGRATING – Connections, Sametime, Notes and Domino and all the ICS stack pretty much – so that is keeping me busy and I am learning new things all the time.

So .. you should be seeing more of me again dear reader – I am back .. not with a bang, but a little fizz – we’ll work on the bang 🙂