Category: Technical

Tech stuff

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Please sponsor us Dandering for Dosh

The Cube Soft team (Nathan and I) have joined with some other fantastic members of the ICS (Lotus) Community and are joining this years Dander for Dosh.

10 Geeks, 100 Miles, 5 days – what could possibly go wrong :)

In previous years a group of community members have raised money for worthy causes with a sponsored walk across some of the British Isles most beautiful country side.

D4DThis years walk is the Lleyn Peninsula Coastal Path (Edge of Wales Walk) 85 miles in five days, and as our coordinator the  lovely Eileen Fitzgerald says “.. there will be blisters , there will be tears .. but most definitely there will be laughter and wine :-) .. ”

This is a truly global community effort with community members from Ireland, NI, the Netherlands, UK and the USA who have signed up so far. This is the route we are taking Lleyn Peninsula Coastal Path (Edge of Wales Walk)

 

 

 

msfThis year the charity that we are supporting is MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders) a fantastic organization that does some amazing work in developing countries.  Steve himself has worked with them in the past. So go on and give generously !!

jg-logo-header-purple

If you would like to sponsor me/us checkout our just giving page or for any of the team please head over to the team just giving page and hand over your hard earned euro, pounds and dollars.

You can also text a donation

textDonate

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

it is for a fantastic cause – thank you SO much in advance from this years team.

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Fun and games with Commuity wigets

Last night we managed to close a PMR that had been open for a few weeks on a strange issue with Community Widgets.

After remapping the connections admin user everything worked exactly as expected except for 2 tiny issues – Adding the blogs and surveys widgets inside a community thew a nasty error.

communityError

 

Thanks to Justin Cornell in IBM support we managed to get to the bottom of the issue by remapping the widgets admin user even though it was mapped correctly.

Jump over to the Cube Soft Blog –  Fun and games with Community Widgets for the full diagnosis and resolution.

Fun and Games – O yes 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

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Help shape connections search

If you are interested in helping IBM shape the search application inside Connections there is a survey that you can participate in.

This is a short survey to better understand attitudes and behaviours around search and how users – well – use it 🙂

You can find the search survey here

Fill it in and you will make a Connections product manager very happy 🙂

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Odd issue with Connections Mail

I have been looking to implement Connections mail for a while for one of my customers, after finally sorting out some SSO issues we had been seeing I was ready to deploy into their DEV/TEST environment. No problem I thought – Connections mail is a very simple install a couple of config files and a quick wsadmin command to get the help to work.

Once I had deployed I was seeing the strangest issues –

Contact your system administrator:
Missing element with class=”os-site-mail-notify”

After spending a few hours trying to work out what the issue was, sanity checking myself in the Connections skype chat and much google-ing – I threw in the towel and opened a PMR. I did my usual of explaining the situation, listing OS and level, Connections versions and fixes etc and sending in a screen shot, Log files and the Connections mail config file – a couple of hours later I had a response.

It appears that something has changed between V4 and V4.5 of connections – I had customisations brought over from V4 and copied the header.jsp as it looked on first glance that there was no changes between 4 & 4.5

In Version 4.5 the span for the mail notify icons is :
–%><span class=”os-site-mail-notify”></span><%–

Previously it was:
–%><span id=”os-site-mail-notify”></span><%–

Changing this span from id to class resolved my issue.

So the moral of the story is even if you think nothing has changed – it most likely has

Big thanks to Jonathan P. Dormady Staff Software Engineer in Connections Support for finding me a solution so quickly

 

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Speaking at Engage

I will be speaking at Engage by BLUG in March – a big thank you to Theo and the team for the opportunity

On Monday the 17th of March I will be Christoph Stoettener’s assistant again in delivering – Adm04. Practical Solutions for Connections Administrators – Tips and Scripts for Your Daily Business – 14:45 – 15:30, room: B

On Tuesday the 18th of March I will be speaking with my friend and college Mr Tim Clark – Adm08. Collaboration Stack – Lessons Learned at the Coal Face – 16:00 – 17:00, room: B

I am looking forward to my first BLUG / Engage as it is such a great conference, the full agenda can be found on the Engage web site

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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 🙂