Sametime 11 commonly faced issues

HCL had a webinar on Sametime 11 and they talked about some of the most commonly faced issues. If you have not attended the webinar, here is the presentation, the last slides are referring to the issues.

Sametime 11 integration with Jitsi – allow guest access

In my previous post here I described how to set up a Jitsi server using the Domino directory as LDAP. That setup required all the users to authenticate before joining a room.

A customer of mine wanted a different thing, he wants to do video meetings with people external to his organization, that obviously are not listed in the Domino directory. I did some research and in the Jitsi forums I saw some other people have done something on that topic, so in the end I came up with a solution.

The idea is this, an user need to log in to create a new room while a guest has only to click on the room link to access it without any authentication.

NOTE: to make this work you should do a apt update and apt upgrade to receive the latest version of the packages used. At first for me this was not working but after the upgrade it did.

1) Go in /etc/prosody/conf.avail, you will see a file with your hostname and the extension.lua. In my case the server is named meeting.eld.it
Edit it and at the end of the file add this

VirtualHost "guest.meeting.eld.it"
        authentication = "anonymous"
        allow_empty_token = true
        c2s_require_encryption = false

2) Then edit the file /etc/jitsi/meet/meeting.eld.it-config.js and add a domin for anonymous.

hosts: {
        // XMPP domain.
        domain: 'meeting.eld.it',
        anonymousdomain: 'guest.meeting.eld.it',

3) Add this line in the /etc/jitsi/jicofo/sip-communicator.properties file

org.jitsi.jicofo.auth.URL=XMPP:meeting.eld.it

Now when a user access the server and create a room he is asked for credentials

All the other users can then join without being asked for credentials once the room is created.

If you set up two Jitsi servers, you can easily use both the solutions I described if you want to have internal users to authenticate and at the same time allow guest access. Use a server for internal meetings and the other for external ones. The Sametime web client can be configured with more than one external service provider. Unfortunately the Sametime connect client can not, you can define only one provider.

Sametime 11 integration with Jitsi. An easy solution to use video-conferencing now

I have worked with my friend and fellow HCL Master Detlev Poettgen in setting up a solution to allow customers to use video-conferencing now, while we wait for Sametime Meetings to ship.

We have used Jitsi, the same technology used by Sametime meeting, and set up a raw integration. Is obviously not  a fully integrated solution, but it works pretty well.

This is something useful for those customers who don’t want to use cloud services like Zoom or Webex or others, but prefer to have a completely on-premise solution, and I have more than one of this kind of customers.

To use this integration, change the preferences in the Sametime client and define an external meeting provider, using a room on the Jitsi server


The same for the web client

Installation and configuration of Jitsi

The first thing to do is to install Jitsi on Ubuntu server 18.04. You can find the instructions here

By default Jitsi does not use authentication, when you set up a Jitsi server, everyone who can access it can create a room or join an existing room.

There is the option to use LDAP for authentication, and I successfully set it up using Domino 11 as LDAP server.

I used the LDAP authentication for jitsi-meet via cyrus/saslauthd

At first, you need to install the following packages:

apt install sasl2-bin libsasl2-modules-ldap lua-cyrussasl

Then go in /etc/prosody/conf.avail, you will see a file with your hostname and the extension.lua, in my example the server is named meeting.eld.it

Edit it and change the authentication to cyrus and add the auth_cyrus to modules_enabled.

You also have to add the config options

    cyrus_application_name = “xmpp”

    allow_unencrypted_plain_auth = true`

as well.

The file should now be looking like this:

Configure saslauthd

Create the file /etc/sasl/xmpp.conf. If the folder sasl do not yet exist, create it.

Paste the follwoing inside the xmpp.conf:

pwcheck_method: saslauthd

mech_list: PLAIN

Now create /etc/saslauthd.conf and add the following. Replace the IP with yours, as well as the search base and the Bind user/password!

ldap_servers: ldap://192.168.1.24:389 ldaps://192.168.1.24:636 

ldap_search_base: o=eld

ldap_bind_dn: cn=Roberto Boccadoro,o=eld

ldap_bind_pw: password

ldap_filter: (mail=%u*)

ldap_version: 3

ldap_auth_method: bind

Important note on ldap filter:

At the first try I used ldap_filter: (mail=%u) but it didn’t work

Use ldap_filter: (mail=%u*)  note the * direct after the %u, and tell your users to enter the portion before the @ sign of their mail address.

Now edit the /etc/default/saslauthd file:

• Change START to yes
• Change MECHANISMS to ldap
• Change MECH_OPTIONS to /etc/saslauthd.conf

and restart the service with service saslauthd restart. You also have to restart prosody now with service prosody restart.

Add prosody to the sasl group by executing the command usermod -aG sasl prosody.

Once you do this configuration, the users accessing your jitsi server will be asked for authentication before joining or creating a room.

Sametime 11 FP1 upgrade. A couple of things I found

Sametime 11 FP1 has shipped, so me and my fellow Master and friend Matteo Bisi started upgrading our test servers immediately.
We found a couple of thing you may want to be aware of in order to upgrade successfully.

Upgrading the Community server on Linux
Matteo did a upgrade of ST to FP1, but for whatever reson it failed. He had 23 file starting with st* in the data direcory instead of 40. So he did a uninstall of Domino and installed it again.
When trying the upgrade of Sametime he got this error


The problem is due to the fact that in the directory /var, there is a hidden file named .com.zerog.registry.xml. I looked into that file and found that it contained the information about Sametime 11 FP1

registry install_date="2020-03-10 11:26:39" version="1.1" last_modified="2020-04-09 09:41:28">

<product name="HCL Domino" id="0e1cb10d-1f39-11b2-8202-e8e16a17fbf8" upgrade_id="0e1cb10e-1f39-11b2-8202-e8e16a17fbf8" version="11.0.0.0" copyright="2018" info_url="www.hcl.com" support_url="www.hcl.com" location="/opt/hcl/domino/notes/11000000/linux" last_modified="2020-04-09 09:41:28"
.
.
.
</product>
<product name="HCL Sametime Server 11.0 FP1" id="17cc219c-1f40-11b2-8e97-ef3209dd0f10" upgrade_id="a63c37b2-1f3f-11b2-af58-ef3209dd0f10" version="11.0.0.1" copyright="2019" info_url="" support_url="" location="" last_modified="2020-04-08 23:05:50">
.
.
.

I told Matteo to remove all the lines relative to Sametime in the file so that it looked like this
After that, the installation of FP1 was successful

Upgrading Sametime Proxy on Windows
When you unzip the Sametime_11.0_FP1_ProxyServer_Win64.zip file you will see that it contains a directory “sametimeproxy”.
Do not extract it where you already have your SametimeProxy overwriting the content. Extract it in another temporary directory.
From that directory launch install.bat; accept the license and in the following screen you will see this

The installer will recognize there is already a ST Proxy installed and ask you if you want to upgrade. If you select to do it, you will be asked where is it installed

Specify the directory where is your existing ST Proxy
This will upgrade your proxy server keeping the existing configuration.