Connections 6 migration observations

I am sure that lots of you have installed or started migrations to Connections 6 by now .. but I have found a couple of gotchas across the installs and updates that I have managed so far.

I am listing them here for sanities sake as I know when we google an error – this blog will show up 🙂

 

Connections 6 itself

 

Generally this was a nice smooth install and all worked as it should in a clean 6 environment

On testing a migration though I found issues when trying to migrate some of the DBs.

After dropping and restoring the DBs some were not updating to the latest DB2 version – this is resolved by running the update DB command

db2 upgrade db <DBNAME>

this upgrades the DB to the latest DB2 version – I run this after each restore command now to ensure the DB does update

for example

db2 restore db BLOGS from E:\install\V55_Backup\db2_backup taken at 20170718123342 ON E:\ into BLOGS
db2 upgrade db BLOGS

 

The metrics DB would not restore as it was complaining about heap size – after a quick google on the error I found a page suggesting just to change the application heap size using the following command

db2 UPDATE DB CFG FOR METRICS USING APPLHEAPSZ 4000

This resolved the problem and the metrics DB could be restored

 

I have also seen issues with the Connections DB update wizard when the databases have a lot of data. In a mature environment I generally run through the wizard and save the update commands to a text file. Then execute them manually from the db2 command window – for example

Activities
 1. E:\IBM\SQLLIB\bin\db2cmd -c -w -i db2 -td@ -vf connections.sql\activities\db2\upgrade-55CR2-60.sql
 2. E:\IBM\SQLLIB\bin\db2cmd -c -w -i db2 -td@ -vf connections.sql\activities\db2\appGrants.sql
 3. E:\IBM\SQLLIB\bin\db2cmd -c -w -i db2 -td@ -vf connections.sql\activities\db2\reorg.sql
 4. E:\IBM\SQLLIB\bin\db2cmd -c -w -i db2 -td@ -vf connections.sql\activities\db2\runstats.sql

Blogs
 1. E:\IBM\SQLLIB\bin\db2cmd -c -w -i db2 -td@ -vf connections.sql\blogs\db2\upgrade-55-60.sql
 2. E:\IBM\SQLLIB\bin\db2cmd -c -w -i db2 -td@ -vf connections.sql\blogs\db2\appGrants.sql
 3. E:\IBM\SQLLIB\bin\db2cmd -c -w -i db2 -td@ -vf connections.sql\blogs\db2\reorg.sql
 4. E:\IBM\SQLLIB\bin\db2cmd -c -w -i db2 -td@ -vf connections.sql\blogs\db2\runstats.sql

Bookmarks
 1. E:\IBM\SQLLIB\bin\db2cmd -c -w -i db2 -td@ -vf connections.sql\dogear\db2\upgrade-55-60.sql
 2. E:\IBM\SQLLIB\bin\db2cmd -c -w -i db2 -td@ -vf connections.sql\dogear\db2\appGrants.sql
 3. E:\IBM\SQLLIB\bin\db2cmd -c -w -i db2 -td@ -vf connections.sql\dogear\db2\reorg.sql
 4. E:\IBM\SQLLIB\bin\db2cmd -c -w -i db2 -td@ -vf connections.sql\dogear\db2\runstats.sql

.................. ETC.

For some reason if you have large DBs the wizard struggles massively. Running the commands manually from the command window also allows you to dump each commands logs out into a text file if you need to. Great for debugging and used a LOT when I ran through the AIX Oracle to Windows DB2 migration last year.

 

Once the DBs were restored and updated run the reorg and runstats against each of the DBs before you start it up and if you can also run the clearScheduler.sql for each DB.

That should sort out the majority of DB issues you may see during the update.

 

Connections TouchPoint

 

Again a fairly easy process once you work out what the documentation is talking about – things of note

The document speaks of copying the touchpoint folder contents to the htdocs directory –

 

 

 

 

 

 

you have to copy the entire folder – for example

Copy files from E:\install\Connections\Touchpoint\touchpoint to E:\IBM\HTTPServer\htdocs\touchpoint the wording in the documentation doesn’t really make that clear.

All of the paths etc in the documenation are case sensitive.

Another thing of note which has tripped me up twice now so I have to blog it (thank you Ben for the extra eyes on this one) is the contents of the touchpoint.deploy.properties

The touchpoint.deploy.properties which is included in the install files is different from the example the documentation gives, we basically mix the two and have the contents of the file looking like this

# when install to a clustered environment, provide clusterName.
# when install to a standalone server, provide node and server name.
clusterName=apps
#nodeName=icbvtDB2Node01
#serverName=server1

# setting required REE custom properties
ree.prop.image.upload.path=E:/IBM/CnxData/shared/touchpoint/upload_pic
ree.prop.profiles.app.entrypoint.host=connections.url.com
ree.prop.profiles.app.entrypoint.scheme=https
ree.prop.profiles.app.entrypoint.port=443

NOTE:  If using windows the image upload path must have / the linux way not \ the windows way. It will fail if you don’t even if you have it in “E:\IBM\etc…” it appears to be a java / python thing and the error will complain that it can not pass the properties file if the slashes are not /

 

IBM Docs CR2

 

To use IBM Docs with Connections 6 you must update to CR2 for Docs – that is fine (and see previous blog posts about issues with applying the CR2 fix).

There is an awesome gotcha that my good friend Roberto pointed me in the direction of the fix for – this one was a good one (thank you Marti for writing the blog)

The symptoms are Docs editing works fine, but when attempting to view a file the error : CLFAF400W: Can’t access the document repository appears

Its a super quick fix – edit the viewer-config.json which can be found in the (i.e \IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\Dmgr01\config\cells\<cell name>\IBMDocs-config)

Under the section

"components": [
 {
 "config": {
 "uploadRepository": "lcfiles",

find the line

 "class" : "com.ibm.concord.viewer.lc3.repository.LCFilesEJBRepository",

and replace it with

 "class": "com.ibm.concord.viewer.lc3.repository.LCFilesCMISRepository"

Just above that you can see the files_path

 "files_path": "E://IBM//CnxData//shared/files/upload"

Add the additional info to that section

 "j2c_alias": "connectionsAdmin", 
 "s2s_method": "j2c_alias", 
 "server_url": "https://connections.url.com/files",
 "files_path": "E://IBM//CnxData//shared/files/upload"

So the full section will now look like this:

 "components": [
 {
 "config": {
 "uploadRepository": "lcfiles", 
 "adapters": [
 {
 "config": {
 "j2c_alias": "connectionsAdmin", 
 "s2s_method": "j2c_alias", 
 "server_url": "https://connections.url.com/files",
 "files_path": "E://IBM//CnxData//shared/files/upload"
 }, 
 "id": "lcfiles", 
 "class": "com.ibm.concord.viewer.lc3.repository.LCFilesCMISRepository"
 },

 

Save the file and do a full sync once a restart of the viewer app is done the viewer will now work.

 

One other thing of note when it comes to migrating the Docs data and DBs is that almost every time you do a migration the wasadmin user will be out of sync and you will see duplicate user issues in the log.

easily resolved by running the syncMember command from the DMGR\bin directory

wsadmin.bat -lang jython

execfile("filesAdmin.py")

FilesMemberService.syncMemberExtIdByLogin("wasadmin")

 

Other things you should do once the docs data has been migrated is to run the generate thumbnails command (also from wsadmin in the filesAdmin section)

wsadmin.bat -lang jython

execfile("filesAdmin.py")

FilesThumbnailService.generateForAllFiles()

 

Also to migrate any drafts from the docs installer directory i.e

wsadmin.bat -lang jython -f E:/IBM/ConnectionsDocs/Docs/installer/docs/tasks/start_migration_tool.py

 

Hopefully you won’t come across any or more than one of these issues, but if you do hopefully there will be a quick resolution.

If I find anything else I will be sure to blog them.

Issues with Oracle with Connections 2.5 RESOLUTION

as posted by me on the Connections Blog earlier today :

IBM have now released new trigger code to resolve this issue.

The steps are simple

* Stop the application
* Backup the DB
* Run through the code to remove the Trigger
* Recreate the Trigger
* Start the primary server and test
* Assuming all is well start the other App Servers in the clusters

As yet IBM are unsure as to how they are going to release the fix as it falls out of the typical iFix scope.
If you are seeing this specific issue please contact the Lotus Connections Support team who will furnish you with the appropriate code to resolve the issue.
As soon as I have confirmation on how this will be distributed I will add what will hopefully be the final update to this on-going saga.

Big thanks to Kieran Reid at IBM and Andrew Frayling and his team at Cardiff Uni for assistance and support in resolving this issue. Great work all round.

Big maintenance weekend coming up

This weekend I am really going to Maintenance town on my live connections cluster.

I have the infamous DB issue to fix. Big props to Kieran Reid from IBM for all the help with this. So triggers to delete and re-add .. no bigg just have to have the system down to solve this ..

That got me thinking .. while its down I may get some other things sorted.
I have some LC config changes to make which should hopefully fix some of the issues I am seeing using Connections with TAM. Hopefully these will work straight away which will lend more power to my elbow that some TAM config changes need to take place (long story will blog when I find the solution) ..

And as we have a new shiny fix pack for connections, I am going to take the opporuinity to take the cluster over the whole weekend and get everything on before we potentially turn it lose on students.

I shall be a busy little nerd girl over the weekend but I am really looking forward to it 🙂

Issues with Oracle on Solaris with Connections 2.5 UPDATE

As I posted on the Connections Blog earlier today …

At last it appears there may be a *real* fix for this .. IBM have changed the trigger code which should hopefully fix the mutating trigger issue we see when deleting files ..

I will be testing this today and if it works rolling it out to my live environment over the next week.

I will attempt to get some confirmation if this code will be fixed in all new fix packs and APARS – watch this space and hopefully some great news

Issues with Oracle on Solaris with Connections 2.5 – UPDATE

After some testing with the SPARC version of this fix – which actually did work we were pleased to find out that Oracle had released a version for x86.

We applied this – this morning, and I am sorry to say it doesn’t work. If you try to delete a file from the DB directly or through the connections interface, the DB is still throwing the mutating trigger issue.

Plot thickens – time to go back to oracle 🙂

Issues with Oracle on Solaris with Connections 2.5

There is an issue when running Connections with Oracle on Solaris
Symptoms of the problem are you can not delete certain files and / or the files widget from communities

The error in the logs is – table FILES.MEDIA is mutating

08/02/10 00:01:00:569 GMT] 0000005d Library E EJPVJ9166E: Unable to delete the library with id b855660b-d6bc-4b19-891f-2087aa3d9a0c. [UserImpl@26ce26ce id=64377ea3-e571-4323-922a-dc0723fead36 directoryId=2BE4B3FF-4AB4-48FF-9B83-73689537A16A]
java.sql.SQLException: ORA-04091: table FILES.MEDIA is mutating, trigger/function may not see it
ORA-06512: at “FILES.PKG_MED_DOWNLOAD_UPD”, line 45
ORA-06512: at “FILES.MED_DOWNLOAD_UPD_S”, line 2
ORA-04088: error during execution of trigger ‘FILES.MED_DOWNLOAD_UPD_S’

at oracle.jdbc.driver.DatabaseError.throwSqlException(DatabaseError.java:112)

We have since discovered (thanks to Kieran Reid in Connections Support for doing the leg work) that this is an issue with Oracle 10.2.0.4 on Solaris – the triggers have an issue which is fixed in 10.2.0.5 – which is a big no no as far as connections go. There is a fix that you can apply to 10.2.0.4 that will resolve the problem.

From support.oracle.com search the knowledge base for 4574851
You should get three results, select the third match
Click on the link for Patch.4574851
Select the 10.2.0.4 release for the Solaris platform
Download, install and test.

*NOTE* this fix is only available for SPARC not x86

So far this appears to have fixed the issue on the backup of the Prod database (I have put a stand-alone LC25 in front of it to test which involved all sorts of DB hacking to get it to work – not recommended unless you are desperate for a quick test). I am hoping to schedule moving our prod DB from x86 to SPARC applying the patch and then plugging my LC25 cluster into it.

Futher to the Portal 6.1.5 set up

Futher to the Portal 6.1.5 set up – these steps were required from an ORACLE DB point of view to get the DB configured :

Grant create session to community
Create likeminds user
Grant create table to community
Grant create view to jcr
Grant unlimited tablespace to community

and also these

grant select on sys.dba_pending_transactions to public;
grant select on sys.pending_trans$ to public;
grant select on sys.dba_2pc_pending to public;
grant execute on sys.dbms_system to public;

if you don’t do this then it just doesn’t work 🙂