Month: May 2008

CompApp wiki: Advanced Page Properties

The documentation for Notes 8 is starting to tickle online at the developerWorks CompApp wiki. Now some documentation on some of the Advanced Pages Properties has appeared at the wiki. Now we just need type-ahead and/or a dropdown selection for the available properties in the UI rather than having to remember and type the property names our selves. Typos in the property names are a major cause of CompApp behavior problems IMHO.

Bob Picciano – please don’t blog like Mike Rhodin!

I’m writing this post as I just deleted my RSS feed for Mike Rhodins blog. I really hope the “new” General Manager of Lotus (Bob Picciano) will be better at blogging than Mike Rhodin who after starting to blog at Lotusphere 2007 managed 7 posts before going completely dark after blogging for 25 days. I don’t know if Mike Rhodin has been blogging internally instead of publicly but it feels wrong that the General Manager of the leading social software platform (Lotus Connections if anyone is wondering) isn’t more visible outside the IBM firewall. Maybe Ed didn’t quite explain the concept… 🙂

So, Bob, please don’t blog like Mike… The community will love you for it.

mod_rewrite for Lotus Connections

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:

  1. Edit the conf/httpd.conf file.
  2. Enable mod_rewrite by removing the # character in front of
    “LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so”.
  3. 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>
  4. Restart IHS.

Easy peasy…

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SWT @ Notes 8: Why OSGi is important

I have posted stuff on the OSGi console previously and why it’s important but even better is to see for your self. I did this myself by adding TwitNotes console commands to the TwitNotes plugin for version 1.0.4. For the normal user it wont matter but it actually proves to be very useful for troubleshooting and something I will definitely add to the other sidebar projects I’m working on.

For more info and code example see the post “Extending the OSGI Console” by Bob Balfe.

WAS lessons from last week

Last week I overcame two stumbling blocks on my way to getting Lotus Connections 2.0 Beta 1 (yeah I know there’s a beta 2) up and running. I’m blogging about it to help others that might experience the same problems.

LDAP issue

The first problem was that I couldn’t log into the WAS admin. console after configuring the federated LDAP directory (I’m using Domino 7.0.2 LDAP). The exception I got in my SystemOut.log was the following (important part in bold):

“00000023 exception E com.ibm.ws.wim.adapter.ldap.LdapConnection search(String, String, Object[], SearchControls) CWWIM4520E The ‘javax.naming.NoPermissionException: [LDAP: error code 50 – Insufficient Access Rights]; remaining name ‘/’; resolved object com.sun.jndi.ldap.LdapCtx@9e009e0′ naming exception occurred during processing.
[29/04/08 11:46:22:494 CEST] 00000023 exception E com.ibm.ws.wim.adapter.ldap.LdapConnection search(String, String, Object[], SearchControls)
com.ibm.websphere.wim.exception.WIMSystemException: CWWIM4520E The ‘javax.naming.NoPermissionException: [LDAP: error code 50 – Insufficient Access Rights]; remaining name ‘/’; resolved object com.sun.jndi.ldap.LdapCtx@9e009e0′ naming exception occurred during processing.
at com.ibm.ws.wim.adapter.ldap.LdapConnection.search(LdapConnection.java:2419)
at com.ibm.ws.wim.adapter.ldap.LdapConnection.checkSearchCache(LdapConnection.java:2349)
at com.ibm.ws.wim.adapter.ldap.LdapConnection.search(LdapConnection.java:2524)
at com.ibm.ws.wim.adapter.ldap.LdapConnection.searchEntities(LdapConnection.java:2668)
at com.ibm.ws.wim.adapter.ldap.LdapAdapter.search(LdapAdapter.java:2763)
at com.ibm.ws.wim.ProfileManager.searchRepository(ProfileManager.java:4094)
“

After spending a lot of time trying to diagnose the issue and making sure I did it EXACTLY as prescribed by IBM I still couldn’t solve the issue. I had no problems logging into the LDAP directory which otherwise worked perfectly from other applications. Finally thanks to Robert Thatcher from IBM the problem was solved. It had nothing to do with wimconfig.xml as such or other WAS goodness – it was simply due to missing rights to the LDAP directory. I guess the exception says it too…

I simply didn’t think the user logging into the LDAP needed anything else than reader access in the ACL of Domino Directory. It turns out that Manager is more like it. Hmmm…. I haven’t turned the access level down yet so I don’t know if less will do it as well.

Also many, many thanks to Courious Mitch for helping me out with wimconfig.xml.
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IHS node issue

Second issue was that I ended up with two nodes under my WAS profile when configuring the IHS WAS plugin. The actual issue that made me look there was that I was unable to manage SSL certificates for the IHS plugin.

The problem was that when creating the webserver1 in the WAS admin. console I didn’t specify the hostname that WAS was actually bound to. Instead I specified the DNS name I would like to contact WAS using which made WAS create two nodes. Using the fully qualified hostname of the WAS server solved this issue.