The last months I built a lot of environments for tests with IBM Connections Componentpack, Rancher, plain Kubernetes, IBM Domino and some more. In former years, I deployed single virtual machines, cloned them and created snapshots to “easily” jump back in cases of errors. Then I found Packer, which helped me to automate the first virtual machines on my local notebook.
Now I use Packer to create templates for VMware vSphere, which then are deployed and multiplied with Terraform. Terraform needs some packages installed in the template, that it can provision virtual machines on vSphere.
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Since thursday the gpn19 (Gulasch Programmiernacht) is taking place in Karlsruhe at ZKM. I’m happy that I got the chance to give two talks:
Documentation with any editor Automate your Infrastructure Deployment
The last IBM Connections 6.0 CR4 introduced the new feature “Sharing Files via Link”. A quite handy way to share files with users by link. Just open the file, go to sharing and select “Share by Link”.
“Share by Link” makes it easy to share and grant read access to personal and Community files.
A lot of people don’t like to store credentials in mobile apps or browsers. A good workaround is the usage of OAuth 2.0 tokens, but the application needs to support it and the server you’re talking to too. The IBM Connections Mobile App can use it for authentication.
OAauth2 can be used directly with WebSphere Application Server and Connections 6.0. There are no special OAuth servers or applications needed!
The Documentation at IBM was a little bit confusing for me, there are lots of sidenotes, but you just need to do following steps, to use OAuth 2.0 token-based authentication with the IBM Connections Mobile App.
In the last days I had a problem with a crashed virtual disk on a WebSphere Application Server. The backup team was able to recover all the data, but the operating system needs to be reinstalled. The operating system was Red Hat Linux, so rpm-based. One of the first tasks after recovery was to identify and reinstall missing packages.
Today I had the pleisure to give a talk about Kubernetes Basics at the Docker Mannheim Meetup. I enjoyed it very much and we had some very good discussions after the talk with the traditional pizza and drinks sponsored by Stocard.
A big shout-out to Jens and Martina for organizing the meetup!
This week starts with Admincamp in Gelsenkirchen. Thanks Rudi Knegt and team for this awesome event! The conference or lets name it camp was real fun. In the end I did three sessions and a workshop. You can find download links to all slides and used files in this article or on https://stoeps.de/speaking/2018/. I learned and heared a lot of interesting stuff around IBM Notes, IBM Connections and Sametime. You can get most of the session slides through the Admincamp agenda.
During my talk at FrOSCon I wasn’t sure how to install Asciidoctor on Windows. So I tried on a Windows 10 VM.
When you want to use Asciidoctor on a Windows desktop, you need to download the Rubyinstaller and install it.
Now you can open a administrative command window and install with gem install asciidoctor.
Today I attended Froscon 13 in St. Augustin. Froscon is one or the biggest event around Opensource in Germany. Thanks again to organizers sponsors of this awesome event, it was a pleisure to be here and have the chance to give a talk.
The slides for my session “Documentation with any editor” can be found at https://gitlab.com/stoeps/froscon18-presentation/blob/master/froscon13-documentationwithanyeditor.pdf.
Today I learned a new lesson during troubleshooting a IBM Connections System. I updated to 6.0 CR2, updated WebSphere to FP13, last fixpack for Docs and so on. You will ask if I added IFP88438 to the list, be sure that I installed this fix which reanables the root element in Federated Repositories. Have a look at WAS 8.5.5 FP12 breaks Domino “root” base entry setting for more details.
Then one of the two deployments showed strange behavior with Activities. On the Activitystream I only got an orange error symbol instead of the Todo list and when I opened Activities directly I got an empty page.
I switched my blog to Hugo the last days. After nearly 12 years with WordPress, I needed something new. Why did I drop WordPress, one of the most used blog engines in the world?
Most used means always most interesting for bad guys. Dynamic pages are slower and can contain more vulnerabilities than static pages (which Hugo generates). Hugo supports git, so I have version control in my posts and design. I can start a small web server locally and test the posts: hugo server -D and the most convenient thing: I can use VIM for editing.
IBM Docs Viewer can open source files with syntax highlighting. This feature is default disabled, but sometimes very useful.
You need to enable it with IBM Connections Gatekeeper.
Watson Workspace Clients are only available for Windows and Mac OS. I’m a 100% Linux user on my devices and I use a Windows virtual machine only if I can’t avoid it. To communicate with colleagues, IBM and DNUG I need to use Watson Workplace, opening the web view is possible, but then I need to search the right tab or forget to open it. Since some weeks there is Zoom (Web / Video meetings) integrated with Watson Workspace too.:
Watson Workspace clients are based on Electron. I’m not a big fan of Electron clients, most of them are big and need tons of system resources. There is enough written about advantages and disadvantages, so I just leave it that way.
The last two weeks I didn’t read that much, I checked some Youtube videos and blogs about CTF and pentesting. One of the most impressive ones are the LiveOverflow videos and blogposts. So when you’re interested in that topic too, just check the links above.
I’m not sure how long ago I started following Dirk Deimekes Blog. It must be years, because I found the rss feed address already in my Google reader export.
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After some deployments of IBM Connections pink and IBM Cloud private, I want to share some tools, links and hopefully helpful information around these products.
So up to IBM Connections 6.0 everything was allowed until it was not excluded in one of the blocklist files. This files are stored within the Deployment Manager profile/config/cells/<cellname>/LotusConnections-config/extern. Now with Connections 6.0CR1 everything is forbidden, until it is enabled in the allowlist. This concept is rolled out for widgets (homepage and communities) and active content. Active content means HTML content too. So everything you or your users add to Connections (blog-posts, wiki pages) gets filtered during the save procedure. This removes all HTML tags and attributes which are not explicitly allowed!
During the week we integrated IBM Connections and IBM Docs in our test environment and everything worked fine. Then we moved the configuration to production and most of the stuff was working, like showing Business cards, profile pictures and Connections files to add into mails. Docs Viewer and uploading files from a mail to Connections generated an error: “because of an internal server error”
This time Social Connections is hosted in Vienna. The austrian capital is a great place to meet new and old friends. I love the city and the awesome dialect, to listen and practise a little bit, start with the lovely video about the only word you really need to survive in Vienna.
With IBM Connections 6 you can deploy the additional component Orient Me, which provides the first microservices which will build the new IBM Connections pink. Orient Me is installed on top of IBM Spectrum Conductor for Containers (CFC) a new product to help with clustering and orchestrating of the Docker containers.
Since some versions of IBM Connections, it is mandatory to delete temp and wstemp of your Connections node after deployment or updates, or you end up with an old layout/design of Connections GUI.
On a Windows Server System this can be a pain, because within temp/wstemp WebSphere Application Server creates a folder structure with nodename / application server name and so on. In must cases the delete ends with the message “path too long”.
This year I attended IBM Connect in San Francisco. In my eyes it was a great event and I enjoyed it very much.
Some announcements are very important for the future and evolution of the IBM portfolio:
Last week I had an issue that some Domino Server didn’t provide SSO through SPNEGO any longer (environment worked for over 2 years now). This environment uses the customized domcfg.nsf template of Andreas Artner, maybe it’s related, but I don’t think so, on Windows 7 with latest Internet Explorer 11 and Domino Servers 9.0.1 with latest fix pack.
This week I installed IBM Connections 5.5CR1 on a Windows Server. I used WebSphere Application Server 8.5.5.9 and everything ran pretty smooth, but the Connections install itself ended in an error after all applications were successfully installed.
Last week I wrote a post about Using Docker and ELK to Analyze WebSphere Application Server SystemOut.log, but i wasn’t happy with my date filter and how the websphere response code is analyzed. The main problem was, that the WAS response code is not always on the beginning of a log message, or do not end with “:” all the time.
I often get SystemOut.log files from customers or friends to help them analyzing a problem. Often it is complicated to find the right server and application which generates the real error, because most WebSphere Applications (like IBM Connections or Sametime) are installed on different Application Servers and Nodes. So you need to open multiple large files in your editor, scroll each to the needed timestamps and check the lines before for possible error messages.
Several people told me that installing the Editors is not described very well in the IBM Connections documentation. So i decided to write down the steps I used to deploy the editors. Hope it helps.
Check Installation on ephox: http://docs.ephox.com/display/EphoxForIBMConnections/Installing+Textbox.io+Services
Wikis in IBM Connections 5.5 have a little bug, because the link (/library instead of /wikis/form/api/library) for images are wrong and so they are not displayed.
Today I got a call that a IBM HTTP Server stopped working after a reboot. The service starts and ends again after some seconds. In the error_log of IBM HTTP we found following messages:
