My friend Marianna Tomasatti and me had the privilege and honor of giving a session at Engage 2023.
Our session was “Tips and tricks for Domino Administrators”, if you’re interested in the slides, Theo has published them on the official Engage website.
https://engage.ug/Engage2.nsf/Pages/session2023?Open&Sp=Roberto
Sametime 12.0.1 introduced a new feature, a monitoring dashboard based on Grafana
https://help.hcltechsw.com/sametime/1201/admin/Managing_dashboard.html
But on Docker it was not working, in various panels, for example those related to meetings it showed “no data”. Some of us reported this to HCL and they told that a fix would be provided for FP1.
In fact if you look at the fix list for FP1 here, you will see this: SAME-46471 – Update to support the Meetings Dashboard on Docker.
I found a small issue, though. For me the dashboard does not show correctly the meeting numbers. Even if you have one or more meetings active , it always shows 0
I had a chat with the Sametime Wizard, Tony Payne from HCL, and he suggested me to edit the file docker-compose-monitoring.yml and change from
cadvisor:
image: google/cadvisor:latest
to
cadvisor:
image: gcr.io/cadvisor/cadvisor:latest
After I did that and restarted the server, the dashboard works perfectly 🙂
If you are interested in Sametime, and I assume you are if you are reading this, I strongly suggest you to attend at Engage the session “Ad08 – Real life challenges and configurations when implementing HCL Sametime” on Tuesday, April 25 at 13:30 – 14:30 done by Erik Schwalb and Herwig Schauer of HCL. I had a meeting with Erik and he showed me a preview of what they will talk about, I can guarantee you that this session is very interesting and useful.
Just like I wrote some time ago about upgrading from 12.0 to 12.0.1, this upgrade is extremely simple and fast, but you have to take some small steps before doing it.
Make a backup copy of the directory where you installed Sametime, e.g.
cp -r /sametime /sametime.bck
This is needed because not all the customization you did will be preserved, in my case I found out that the /sametime/sametime-config/web/branding and /sametime/sametime-config/web/acme-certs directories were not kept. I found out this, because not having the certificates my server did not start correctly.
So after the upgrade, just copy the missing directories from the backup directory to the install directory before starting the server.
NOTE: In FP1 the ST containers no longer run as root, so the sametime-config directory and all its subdirectories are not owned by root:root but by 1000:1000; if you copy the directories from the backup to the working directory check and (if required) change the ownership of the files and directories you brought back from the backup directory.
As I wrote in a previous post about upgrading Sametime, if you have integrated mail you will have to edit docker-compose.yml and change again SAMETIME_EXTERNAL_WAR_INTEGRATION=true.
To upgrade, unzip Sametime_Premium_12.0.1_FP1.zip in the directory where you have installed sametime. Make sure to overwrite all the files, on a test server I made a mistake and did not upgrade install.sh, so in the end I ran the 12.0.1 install file, which is not a good idea 🙂
Once unzipped, just run ./install.sh, it will ask you if you want to upgrade the existing Sametime, answer Y and that’s all. If you are not running the install as root, it will prompt you for the sudo password towards the end, when it updates the permissions in the ‘sametime-config’ directory.
HCL software Academy has changed the requirements for the Domino V12 Update Certification exam.
https://academy.hcltechsw.com/domino12-certified-admin-update
This certification exam is for individuals who can provide proof of one of the IBM Domino Certifications below:
My developer colleague, Fabio di Paola, has done some experimenting with ChatGPT and he successfully used it with LotusScript.
He published an article, in Italian, on our blog, here.
To save you the hassle of translating, here it is in English:
OpenAI.com’s ChatGpt is kind of the main topic of the last few months, we’ve all tried to use it and we’re thinking about how to use it in real cases. Precisely in the light of these considerations, the first question we asked ourselves was “but will I be able to use it within a Domino application?”
OpenAi has released APIs to connect to ChatGpt but, at least for now, they are limited to Python and node.js . In addition several communities have already published code libraries to connect to ChatGpt from other languages. It’s hard to think that something like this will ever be done for LotusScript .
But going to see how the calls are made and trying to experiment on the ChatGpt playground you can understand the mechanisms that underlie the calls to ChatGpt.
The first thing needed, regardless of the code used, is the API key for authentication: this is obtained by registering on the site and then going to the details of your account under ApiKeys It is a string of 51 characters which must then be passed
to every call.
At this point I started building a first prototype in LotusScript, the main parts are two:
For the NotesHttpRequest there is little to say, just remember that the API key must be managed as a header of the request.
For the Json part there are obviously various possibilities to build it and then to parse it, obviously the important thing is to follow the ChatGpt rules: here too, using the playground you can easily understand how to build it, which parameters to pass and how.
A typical example is this:
{
"model": "text-davinci-003",
"prompt": "Ask here the question.",
"temperature": 0,
"max_tokens": 100,
"top_p": 1,
"frequency_penalty": 0,
"presence_penalty": 0,
"stop": ["\n"]
}
Also to parse the response there are several possibilities, you can use the NotesJSONNavigator class in LotusScript or a library already present on the net like this one https://www.openntf.org/main.nsf/project.xsp?r=project /JSON+LotusScript+Classes in OpenNTF.
At the end of all what I got is a form in which to enter the question with a button that sends it, parses the answer and writes the answer itself in a field below, all using only LotusScript :
I add a curiosity: among the questions I asked ChatGpt I asked if he knows LotusScript (with an affirmative answer) and then I asked if he could write me the LotusScript code to send requests to ChatGpt. Again the answer was yes but the code he gave me had several errors.
I replied pointing out the various errors and corrections were proposed to me which were equally incorrect. As far as I understand at the moment ChatGpt doesn’t “learn” from its mistakes, so it’s possible that asking it the same questions again will result in the same errors.
I set up the monitoring dashboard in Sametime, using the provided JSON files; in case you don’t know how to do that, you enable it running this command
docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose-monitoring.yml up -d
https://help.hcltechsw.com/sametime/1201/admin/Managing_dashboard.htmlToday I discovered that my Prometheus container kept crashing, and in the logs I found lines like these:
corrupted block 01GQT2R33ASC29W57NF4WEZKP3: open data/01GQT2R33ASC29W57NF4WEZKP3/chunks: no such file or directory;
corrupted block 01GQW0HNMW76WDHNY6T8CMEVQ0: open data/01GQW0HNMW76WDHNY6T8CMEVQ0/chunks: no such file or directory;
corrupted block 01GQGDRDRKSS062T1762WACX5H: open data/01GQGDRDRKSS062T1762WACX5H/chunks: no such file or directory;
corrupted block 01GQJBHXKJW38754FR7CZGTWZN: open data/01GQJBHXKJW38754FR7CZGTWZN/chunks: no such file or directory;
corrupted block 01GQM9BGT78HDQXM2EZ2BP5P8S: open data/01GQM9BGT78HDQXM2EZ2BP5P8S/chunks: no such file or directory;
corrupted block 01GQP75073Q7FRW2MEGE1T5869: open data/01GQP75073Q7FRW2MEGE1T5869/chunks: no such file or directory;
corrupted block 01GQR4YKN8XJS7FY30VYR24VTG: open data/01GQR4YKN8XJS7FY30VYR24VTG/chunks: no such file or directory"
In fact looking at the directory structure under /tmp/prometheus, the default directory where Prometheus store files I found this:
https://www.credly.com/badges/64ec2893-5cee-4970-bdec-444a39198a42/public_url
Also this year, Theo Heselmans made me the honor of accepting my submission 🙂
I will be speaking with my dear friend Marianna Tomasatti, another Italian HCL Business Partner.
Our session is: Ad01. Useful hacks for Domino Administrators
It will be Wednesday, April 26 from 13:30 to 14:30 in room C. – Husly Lounge
You can find all the awesome sessions of Engage 2023 here
It will be a pleasure for me to speak again at this great event. Engage is the new Lotusphere! And it will be great to meet again many friends from all over the world.
Hope to see many of you there!
I couldn’t say it better, so I will make mine the words of my friend and fellow Ambassador Cormac McCarthy, https://dominopeople.ie/im-a-hcl-ambassador-again-for-2023/
After digging a bit into the issue I reported in my previous post, I found out that this is not a bug of Sametime.
The problem lies in my customer network topology. As in many other customers I work with, they have some servers on the intranet, and some others on the internet, in this specific case the Domino server that is the LDAP server is on an internal domain ( .lan ) while the Sametime server is on a public domain ( .it ).
This is not a problem for Sametime, all you need to do is use some “extra_host” settings in docker-compose.yml and it works
The problem is that the URL generated by Verse when people upload their pictures is https:// pointing to the Domino server and the Sametime proxy does not like self signed certificates. In fact if I manually change it to use http:// rather than https:// in the person document, then the user picture is displayed correctly
I do not believe I can have the Verse development team change the way they generate the URL and use http:// so with this kind of network topology I have to find a workaround, else the problem will remain.
Thanks to my friend Erik Schwalb from HCL, who got in touch with me and told me that in his setup, where all the servers are in public domains using proper certificates this works fine.