lekkimworld.comihs

File not found when using IBM Connections Media Gallery

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:58:08 GMT

At a customer users were reporting that the media gallery in IBM Connections did not work. The error they were seeing was aneror message in the UI telling them that the file they just selected from their file system did not exist. Very strange. After diagnosing the issue it was caused by the media gallery not having been set up correctly as the default file types wasn't imported into the configuration. Why these defaults are not set automatically is the topic for another day.

There are two templates which determine the file types you can upload by default. You should also have these in your AppSrv01 profiles, or your nodes, etc. The step is done by following the instructions in the info center.

Disabling HTTPS communication between IHS WAS Plugin and WAS servers

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:52:50 GMT

Many people believe that you have to have multiple servers to run IBM Connections - this simply isn't true! There's no reason why you cannot run everything of the same server which is what we do here at the office. When you do that, if all servers are inside the firewall - or if you simply doesn't care about the security that it provides - you can disable the IHS WAS Plugin from communicating with the WAS server using SSL. A benefit from this is among other things that you do not have to care about certificates between the IHS WAS Plugin and the WAS server which simplifies installation and management.

Any way... For a while I've doing this configuration change manually directly in plugin-cfg.xml (by commenting the HTTPS transport out) until it bit us the other day. So I finally decided to find a proper, correct, solution. And of course there is a way to do this and it's very well documented in IBM Technote 1452735. So if you want to make that change go ahead and do it - I did and it's working flawlessly.

Installing Lotus Connections 2.5 on Windows 2008 Server

Wed, 26 May 2010 11:38:05 GMT

The last two weeks I have had the honor of installing Lotus Connections 2.5 on Windows 2008 Server 64 bit with Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Twice. And what a change from my normal Windows 2003 Server. In this blog post I'll outline some of the issues I ran into and what I had to pay special attention to.

First off Tivoli Directory Integrator 6.1.1 (the component that move data from LDAP to the Profiles SQL database) isn't supported and doesn't run on Windows 2008 Server. The TDI scripts provided with Lotus Connections 2.5 doesn't work with TDI 7 which leaves you at a dead stop. Only solution as of now is to find a Windows 2003 Server or other Windows platform to run TDI. Hopefully Lotus Connections NEXT will use TDI 7.

Next issue I had to address was that Websphere Applicaton Server (WAS) 6.1 should be at fixlevel 19 before you create any profiles on a Windows 2008 Server. This meant that the profile couldn't be created as part of the WAS installer. This wasn't too big of an issue as it's a best practice not create the profile during setup anyway. A benefit of doing it this way is that it allows you to create the profile in another location than between your WAS binary directory.

So all was well and good? Not really as the GUI tool to manage profiles isn't supported on Windows 2008 Server either. There is however a manageprofiles command to manage profiles which may be used. The command looks rather convoluted but it goes something like this (I ran it was admin):

manageprofiles.bat -create -profileName AppSrv01 
   -profilePath d:\WASProfiles\AppSrv01 
   -templatePath c:\ibm\websphere\appserver\profileTemplates\default 
   -nodeName LotusConnectionsNode01 
   -cellName LotusConnectionsCell01 
   -hostName lc.example.com 
   -isDefault 
   -winserviceCheck true 
   -winserviceAccountType specifieduser 
   -winserviceUserName username 
   -winservicePassword password 
   -winserviceStartupType manual

The last few arguments create the Windows service. I have had some success doing this but most times I leave the "winservice"-arguments out and use WASService.exe to create the service instead.

wasservice -add LotusConnections 
   -serverName server1 
   -profilePath d:\wasprofiles\appsrv01 
   -startupType automatic

When I installed Lotus Connection I had to run install.bat as admin to avoid having the SQL connection check fail.

Generally in Windows 2008 Server I found that paying special attention to drive and folder security made my life a lot easier. That goes for both WAS and IBM HTTP Server IHS). Additionally on one IHS server I had to manually install GSKit to enable SSL as it wasn't installed by the installer. I also had to put GSKit (C:\IBM\GSK7\lib) on the PATH in Windows. To symptom was that IHS couldn't access the SSL keystore.

I hope this will help someone.

SSL certificates and the WAS plugin

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:38:00 GMT

Had some issues yesterday morning with the SSL certificate used between the WAS IHS plugin and WAS for a Lotus Connections installation (Dannotes in case you were wondering why you couldn't log in this morning). Again it turned out to be the all to well known "ERROR: lib_stream: openStream: Failed in r_gsk_secure_soc_init: GSK_ERROR_BAD_CERT(gsk rc = 414)" issue where the SSL certificate from WAS isn't trusted by the IHS WAS plugin.

The issue were "easily" solved by help of Technote 1264477 (GSK_ERROR_BAD_CERT error configuring SSL between Plug-in and Application Server V6.1). The solution is of course to extract the certificate from WAS and import it into the IHS WAS plugin keystore.

Using a non self-signed certificate with Lotus Connections

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 08:34:51 GMT

When you deploy Lotus Connections you find out that the login has to be done using SSL and hence you need a SSL certificate. When Lotus Connections is installed a self-signed certificate is generated but you'll probably want to use a "real" certificate whether this be one signed by a public CA or one signed by a corporate CA. Doing this is quite simple if you only swap out the IBM HTTP Server certificate as this only requires change to httpd.conf and using the ikeyman application.

Although the ikeyman application looks like something from another century it works and does its job. To launch it go to c:\websphere\appserver\profiles\appserver1\bin and invoke ikeyman.bat (substitute the path as appropriate). Once this is done follow the documentation to create a new keystore database (KDB format) and create a stash file. Then generate a new key pair and submit the keys for certification at your CA (again follow the documentation). The stash file is used by the web server to open the otherwise encrypted keystore without a password.

When you receive the reply please bear in mind that the certifying certificate must be in the keystore before accepting the reply. For most CA's this will require you to import a certificate before proceeding. This goes for Equifax as well as Verisign. The easiest way to find these is to surf to your CA and search for "intermediate".

Once this is done you can import the certificate reply, update httpd.conf, restart IHS and you're laughing...

mod_rewrite for Lotus Connections

Thu, 15 May 2008 12:53:19 GMT

I'm messing a fair bit with Lotus Connections these days as I'm configuring Lotus Connections 2.0 beta 2 at the office. Lotus Connections 2.0 comes with six features as a new Homepage feature has been added. By default you configure each of the six features with a separate server path that is /activities, /homepage etc. This means that the users have to explicitly state which feature to access from the get-go (e.g. http://lc.example.com/homepage). What I really wanted was for the Homepage feature to display whenever the user surfed to the "base url" (http://lc.example.com).

This is actually quite easy as Websphere uses IBM HTTP Server which is a fork of the standard Apache server. This means that IHS ships with the mod_rewrite module which allows you to do URL rewriting.

The steps are as follows:

Edit the conf/httpd.conf file.
Enable mod_rewrite by removing the # character in front of "LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so".

At the bottom of the file add the following:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteLog logs/rewrite_log.log
   RewriteLogLevel 0
   RewriteRule ^/?$ /homepage [PT,L]
</IfModule>

Restart IHS.

Easy peasy...