OrientMe in a test environment. How to make it work

For all my test systems I do not use a real domain name, I usually go with something like server.roberto.local or the like. This is a problem when you try to install the new OrientMe component that IBM has shipped with Connections 6.

The install scripts perform a nslookup and check the domain name then add the resulting IP address to your host file, then it will try to connect to that address and obviously fail. The strange thing is that it will return an IP address also for .local domains, so basically whatever is your fake domain name, it will find a valid IP and fail the installation.

There is a workaround to make it work, it requires changing a few lines in four files.
When you install OrientMe, the instructions say to copy the deployCFC folder to /opt; open a terminal and go in /opt/deployCFC. There are several files in there, we need to modify the following four:
A-03-all-setup-hosts.sh
A-04-boot-setup-ssh-keys.sh
B-20-boot-setup-cfc.sh
B-22-all-configure-cfc.sh

Open for editing the file A-03-all-setup-hosts.sh and fine the following line
ip=${resolve_ip_return_result}
then change it to
ip=your ip address (192.168.1.x or whatever you use)

Open for editing the file A-04-boot-setup-ssh-keys.sh and do the same as above

Open for editing the file B-20-boot-setup-cfc.sh and find the following 3 lines:
master_ip=${resolve_ip_return_result} and change it to master_ip=your ip address
worker_ip=${resolve_ip_return_result} and change it to worker_ip=your ip address
proxy_ip=${resolve_ip_return_result} and change it to proxy_ip=your ip address

Open for editing the file B-22-all-configure-cfc.sh and fine the following line
master_ip=${resolve_ip_return_result} and change it to master_ip=your ip address

Make sure you have your server name and IP address in the /etc/hosts file

Now here comes the fun bit 🙂 In the /opt/deployCFC directory there is a file, manifest.md5, that contains the MD5 hashes of the script files, e.g. MD5 (deployCfC/00-all-config.sh) = f826bfd38a81ecafc55020563dc3db75
So if you try now to run the modified scripts it will not work throwing a checksum error.
You have to do the following: for each of the 4 modified files, compute a new MD5 hash, use the command md5sum to do that, e.g md5sum A-03-all-setup-hosts.sh you will get
a77f66e359a4e1f531d8220bb3f309b6  A-03-all-setup-hosts.sh

For each file get the new string and put it in the manifest.md5 file replacing the original one and save the file.

After those changes the installation script will connect to your server and the installation will proceed successfully.

A word of caution: do try this only for test environments where you do not have a real domain name available. Do NOT do this for production systems, those will have a proper domain name and you do not need to do this, also because if something goes wrong IBM will not support you if you have changed the script files.

IBM Docs 2.0 CR2 viewer and Connections 6 not working

I installed Connections 6.0 and then Docs 2.0 CR2.
When I tried to preview a file I got an error saying that the viewer service is not running.

The excellent Martti Garden, the Docs guru, has found a solution for that, see here
http://socialibmer.com/ibm-docs-viewer-not-working-with-ibm-connections-6-0-with-error-clfaf401w-clfaf400w/

IBM Verse on Premises, enabling encrypted and signed mail. You may need to do something if you have your ID in the mailfile

For Verse on Premises in order to write and read  signed and/or encrypted mail is enough to set up an ID Vault on the Domino server and add the user’s ID to that.

I found that if you previously used iNotes for mail and have added your ID to the mailfile, then you will get an error while reading or creating a signed/encrypted mail; the error will say that your ID is not in the vault, even if actually the ID is there.

In order to fix that, you need to access your mail with iNotes, go in Preferences – > Security and click on the button Sync with Vault

Once done that, everything works

Speaking at SNoUG and Engage

My next speaking engagements are in Switzerland and Belgium.
On March 22 I will speak at SNoUG, the Swiss IBM User Group, in Zurich. I will have a session on “IBM Verse on Premise”.

On May 8-9 I will speak at Engage, the most famous and attended User Group in Europe, it is practically a Connect Europe if you look at the quantity and quality of the speakers. I will have a session with the amazing Sharon Bellamy James on “Troubleshooting IBM Connections”

Hope to see you there!

Domino Feature pack 8 breaks Verse on Premises

I installed Domino Feature Pack 8 and the new templates and Verse on Premises stopped working.  The installation of the FP replaces a lot of files in Domino and it had reset the \data\osgi\shared\eclipse\plugins directory removing the files I had copied there for the VoP installation. I copied again the files there. Also there is a new template mail9.ntf and this does not have the views needed for VoP, so I had to copy again the 5 views from the VoPdesign.nsf database in the mail9.ntf template, then run the design task to update all the mail files.

IBM Verse on Premises 1.0.0.1 Interim Fix 1 shipped

Yesterday IBM released the Interim Fix 1 for IBM VoP 1.0.0.1

The list of fixes is the following

Fix introduced in release	SPR	Description	Additional Information
Verse On-Premises 1.0.0.1 Interim Fix 1	261564	Issues when searching for messages from someone whose address format is their name in quotation marks followed by their email address enclosed in brackets.
	261382	Inbox doesn’t work with specific messages
	261684	Verse impact – Meetings created in iNotes using OS time zone are off by two hours

You can download the IF1 from Fix Central at this address
https://www-945.ibm.com/support/fixcentral/swg/selectFixes?product=ibm%2FLotus%2FIBM+Verse+On-Premises&fixids=Verse_1001IF1&function=fixId&parent=Collaboration%20Solutions

To install it you need to remove the files added in the c:\Domino\osgi\shared\eclipse\plugin directory by VoP 1.0.0.1 i.e.

then unpack the new IBM_Verse_On_Premises.zip in the same directory

IBM Connections CCM upgrade to CR2 and special characters in passwords

I was updating a Connections install to CR2 with CCM; when it came to update the FNCE server I ran the command
C:\IBM\Connections\FileNet.update\scripts>update-ce.bat -was.dm.path=c:\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\Dmgr01 -was.admin.user=localadmin -was.admin.password=password -conn.home.location=c:\IBM\Connections -ce.fp.installer.location=C:\Downloads\ic55cr2\filenet\5.2.1.4-P8CPE-WIN-FP004.EXE
The update-ce command runs wsadmin to connect to the DM as a first thing.

I got an error, the Deployment Manager is inaccessible.

If I tried to run wsadmin manually I could connect to the Deployment Manager, so I was puzzled.
I decided to ask the community for help and I picked the excellent Ben William‘s brain.After chatting for a while it came out that the user I was using to run wsadmin had a password with a special character in it, a ! Ben suspected it could be the cause so I created another user in WAS, with a password without special characters, gave it admin roles and run again the update-ce command.
Everything worked this time 🙂

So my advice is: choose your admin passwords carefully, otherwise sometimes you can run into problems. I usually mix letters and numbers, caps and no caps, but I try to avoid special characters.

A kind request to conference organizers

In those last two years I spoke at several conferences, from IBM Connect to various user group meetings. I have a request for the conference organizers; if you give to the attendees a sheet for the sessions evaluations, please share the results of the evaluations with us speakers. This does not always happen. It would be beneficial for me as a speaker to know how good or bad I performed. If something is wrong I can work towards correcting it, is not just a matter of ego, though everyone likes a good rating.

IBM Verse on Premises 1.0.0.1 integration with Connections Files. How to make it work – Updated

I installed Verse on Premises 1.0.0.1 in my environment but when I tried to add a link to a file in Connections when composing an email I got an error “Sorry we cannot retrieve your files at the moment”.

After a chat with my excellent friend and IBM Champion Christoph Stoettner, he found the problem and the solution.
The official documentation about integrating VoP with Connections says to add a few lines at the end of the httpd.conf file:

• Make a backup copy of httpd.conf.
• Remove any comment symbols (#) from the following lines:
  LoadModule headers_module modules/mod_headers.so
LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
• Find the following two lines:
  LoadModule was_ap22_module /opt/IBM/WebSphere/Plugins/bin/64bits/mod_was_ap22_http.so
WebSpherePluginConfig /opt/IBM/WebSphere/Plugins/config/webserver1/plugin-cfg.xml

  Copy the following lines and paste them directly after the two lines:

  RewriteEngine on
  
  # Minor change to adjust for Cloud vs On-Premises API variation of parameter name
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} PUT
  RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*)uid=(.*)
  RewriteRule ^/profiles/photo.do /profiles/photo.do?%1userid=%2 [L]
  
  # Added necessary CORS headers when Origin header present
  Header unset Access-Control-Allow-Origin
  SetEnvIf Origin "^https://(vop_server_hostname\.)?(domain_name)$" origin_is=$0
  Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Origin %{origin_is}e env=origin_is
  Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Credentials "true" env=origin_is
  Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Headers "X-Requested-With, Content-Type, slug" env=origin_is
  Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Methods "POST, GET, OPTIONS, DELETE, PUT" env=origin_is
  
  Header always set Access-Control-Max-Age "1000" env=origin_is
  Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Methods "POST, GET, OPTIONS, DELETE, PUT" env=origin_is
  # Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Headers "X-Requested-With, Content-Type, Origin, Authorization, Accept, Client-Security-Token, Accept-Encoding, slug" env=origin_is
  Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Headers "X-Requested-With, Cache-Control, Content-Language, Content-Type, Expires, Last-Modified, Pragma, slug, X-Update-Nonce" env=origin_is
  Header always set Access-Control-Expose-Headers "Content-Disposition, Content-Encoding, Content-Length, Date, Transfer-Encoding, Vary, ETag, Set-Cookie, Location, Connection, X-UA-Compatible, X-LConn-Auth, X-LConn-UserId" env=origin_is
  
  # Added a rewrite to respond with a 200 SUCCESS on every OPTIONS request.
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} OPTIONS
  RewriteRule .* - [R=200,L]
  
  # Remove the Origin header if it exists for other requests (POST, GET, DELETE, PUT). Causes problems with Connections returning 403 response.
  RequestHeader unset Origin env=origin_is

   You have to change this line

  SetEnvIf Origin "^https://(vop_server_hostname\.)?(domain_name)$" origin_is=$0

  putting your server name and domain name.
  Examples
  vop_server_hostname = mail01
  domain_name = company.com

  `SetEnvIf Origin “^https://(mail01\.)?(company\.com)$” origin_is=$0`

This is not enough.
Since in the httpd.conf I use a virtual host, as is common in Connections, you need to add those lines also in the virtual host definition, so I copied them after the line

SSLProtocolDisable SSLv2 SSLv3

Restarted the http server and now the integration works.

UPDATE

The excellent Tim Clark, a good friend of mine and an IBM Champion, made a couple of interesting and useful suggestions in his comment to this post. I will put them here because not everyone read the comments

1. It is possible to make the https optional with the following RegEx, http(s)?
   So it all looks like this in the end.
   `SetEnvIf Origin “^http(s)?://(mail01\.)?(company.com)$” origin_is=$0`
2. you can put all the lines to copy and paste in a separate file so that you don’t have to have it listed twice in your httpd.conf file and then use an include to insret it (**twice**) where you need it.`Include “X:\IBM\HTTPServer\conf\vop.conf”`

Want a discount for attending IBM Connect ?

Stealing the post from my good friend Sharon Bellamy James. I couldn’t say this better.