As you hopefully know, OpenNTF has launched a new initiative, the OpenMic with the Developers sessions. If you don’t know about this, you can read more here
We have created an email address, openmic@openntf.org, that you can use to send your questions in advance, so if you want to ask something on the topic discussed, you don’t have to wait for the session to go live. This means that even if you are not able to attend the session, you can watch the replay video later and get the answer.
If you are “senior” enough, like me, i.e. you were playing with a Notes server when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, you surely remember the annual Yellowverse gathering event, Lotusphere.
Great opportunity to meet distant friends, and to learn from excellent technical sessions; but one was for sure everyone’s favorite, the last one to close the show, “Ask the Developers”. If don’t know what I am talking about, it was a session where 15 / 20ish developers from the lab were on stage and everyone could ask any kind of technical question to them. There were Product Managers too, in case someone asked “Where is Domino Designer for my Mac?” (IYKYK); that is the kind of question that a developer can’t answer.
OpenNTF and HCL are bringing you back to the future 🙂 We will host each month a Open Mic session with HCL Developers, on different topics, where you can ask them your toughest questions. Please keep it as focused as you can on the specific topic, asking again when the Designer for Mac will ship would just be a waste of time…. 😉 . In order to avoid confusion, the session will be moderated, i.e. we will unmute a person at a time to allow him to ask the question. It will not be all the mics open all the time.
This is the announcement video
The first session will be on Thursday Jan 23rd at 11 AM EST, 5 PM for us in Central Europe, 4 PM for the Brits, who always like to be different 😛 , and the topic will be “Domino authentication protocols”, with Dave Kern (aka the Resident Paranoid) and other member from the security team.
Please head over regularly to OpenNTF blog main page where we will publish all the dates and topics for the Open Mic sessions, as we already do for our webinars
Is a nice way to end the year to receive this mail:
“Hi Roberto,
Congratulations!
You are receiving this email from us as you are being recognised as an HCL Ambassador for 2025. We think that’s super awesome!”
Is a honor and a privilege to be part of this group once more. In the Ambassador class there are people who are literally legends in the yellowverse and being in company of them is really a great accomplishment for me.
One of the very big news in Sametime 12.0.2 FP2 is the new Sametime Chat server (only chat, no meetings) for Windows.
I believe this is useful for the MS die-hard fans, or for those who don’t feel confident with Linux and containers. Though in my personal opinion the standard containerized version is a better choice.
Anyway, I installed it. The procedure is the same as for the old version: you have to install Mongo and create the sametime user and the databases. All this is detailed in the instructions here https://opensource.hcltechsw.com/sametime-doc/v1202/admin/t_configure_mongodb.html, though you have to be aware not to simply copy/paste the script from that page because it contains line breaks, copy it in a text file, make it a single line and then use this one. Then you have to modify the mongod.cfg file and enable replication and restart Mongo. Then the installation of the Sametime server is basically “next,next,…” in the various screens that show up. You have to give the server name, the mongodb connection string, select the LDAP server type and give its details. Nothing new, which is good for those familiar with the previous version setup.
All in all it takes less than 10 minutes if you don’t make any mistake. If you do, in the Sametime installation directory there’s a sub-directory named Trace, that contains the logs. Have a look there to find what’s wrong. The setup will create several services (sounds familiar ?) and the one you need to start to fire up and shut down Sametime is called “ST Community Launch”, which is the only one set to automatic start.
That’s it. Now even if you are not familiar with Linux, there’s no excuse not to have a Sametime Chat server running in your company 🙂
Today HCL releasead Sametime 12.0.2 FP2, so I immediately installed it on one of my test servers.
As I repeatedly said before, the upgrade can’t be much easier than this. Just unzip the new file, run ./install.sh and select to upgrade the existing version.
Though at the moment of this writing there is not yet the fix list available, FP2 solves a bug in the metrics that was introduced in FP1.
In FP1 there were 3 statistics that showed “NO DATA” in the Chat Proxy section. Uptime Start Time Application Start and Ready Time
Apologies to my readers, this is not the usual technical post, but something happened that made me not happy, and I just need to explain to my friend why I have disappeared from Facebook.
It all started 15 days ago, when I received a message on Discord from my good friend Hogne Bo Pettersen, asking me if it was something he said that made me unfriend him.
I was flabbergasted, to say the least, because I did not unfriend him, so I went to log on to FB to check what happened.
I could not log in and I saw this
Well, is pretty obvious that this one is NOT my Instagram account. To me looks like a bot attack. Anyway, it seems that the only way to ask to remove the suspension is log on to IG and file a report.
I did that, using my real IG account, but obviously the savy monkeys that manage Meta security and “compliance to the rules” expect me to log on using that su9…. account, because so far they gave me no answer.
I was already considering since some time to leave Facebook, it has its advantages, I love to be able to see what my friends are doing, their pictures, the little or big things that happen in their life and they want to share; on the other hand it was getting worse everyday, about half of the posts were “advertising” or “sponsored” or “we thing you may find this interesting”, which made it difficult to go to the post that really were interesting for ME and not the Meta advertisers
Now they gave me the reason to do it, they threw me out and I do not have the slightest intention of creating another profile and use that crap again.
What did my supposed IG account do to not follow their rules ? Give a bit of explanation? No, huh ? Imagine you get a fine with the motivation “you broke the law”….
I always thought that the people behind Meta “compliance” were a bunch of brainless invertebrates or even less intelligent beings and this is just a confirmation. What can you expect from a company that censor a post with a statue of Milo’s Venus because” it shows a nipple” and then accept to advertise this ?
So, as I already did with Twitter, my last message to Meta is “fuck off”, learn to better manage your users.
My friends that really want to reach me can find me on Discord, though is a completely different way of interaction, or they have my phone number.
I have been asked to give more details about the .taz file that I mentioned in my previous post.
I hope you have read the excellent posts from Martjin and Daniel, where they explain the structure of the tarball.
In my case it is very simple: create on your machine a domino-bin directory e.g. /home/domino-bin, and put there the ontimegc file.
Then go in the /home directory and issue the command : tar cvzf OnTime15.taz domino-bin/
The content of the file is this: # tar -tvf OnTime15.taz drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2024-10-10 09:02 domino-bin/ -rwxr-xr-x root/root 57352 2024-10-10 09:02 domino-bin/ontimegc
Place the file in the default directory, usually /local/software, and follow the instructions in my previous post.
First of all, a big THANK YOU! to my friend and fellow HCL Ambassador Martijn de Jong . If you don’t know him, he’s one of the gurus for Domino containers, together with Daniel Nashed. Without his invaluable help, my work would not have been possible.
Running Domino in a container is becoming more and more popular in these days. I assume the reader is familiar with the topic, I am not going to explain how to create and run a Domino container. If you want to know more about Domino containers watch the replay of the webinar that Martijn did for OpenNTF and read his presentation
OnTime is included in Domino, starting with Release 14, is a great tool and I encourage my readers to use it, the version included in Domino is free and very powerful. The issue is that Intravision, creates new releases of OnTime faster that HCL creates new releases of Domino, which is obviously understandable. For example the OnTime version included in Domino is 11.1, but the most recent is 11.5. Hence if you want to keep updated your environment, you need to upgrade OnTime.
The upgrade of OnTime is so easy that I am tempted to use the word trivial. Unzip the file you downloaded from their site, and expand it on your local PC where you have Notes installed. Open the installer.nsf database and follow the instructions, i.e. select the language and select if is a first install or an upgrade. That’s it.
On Linux there are a couple of extra steps you have to do 1. Copy the OnTime task for Linux, ‘ontimegc’ from the installation files /ExtraFiles/Tasks to the Domino server program directory. 2. Run as owner or root ‘chmod 755 ontimegc’ (-rwxr-xr-x)
That is OK if you run Domino on Linux native, but what if you run Domino in a container ?
Copying the files in the program directory into the container is easy (again, I assume you are familiar with Docker) and it works, but….. if you stop the container and restart it you will lose the update. Because the updated ontimegc file is not in the base image where you created the container from, so restarting the container will bring you back to 11.1.
There are two ways to solve this, thanks Martijn for pointing me in the right direction, and make the updated file always available in the program directory of Domino:
1) Install the latest version of OnTime as a custom addon when building the image
2) A quick and dirty trick using volumes
Install the latest version of OnTime as a custom addon when building the image
Once you have the taz file you just run this command: ./build.sh -custom-addon=OnTime15.taz#e13658bd364b55cb31196242100db36501724e728eac00fc43aa2d50e4cc7f61 menu In this example OnTime15.taz is the name of the file I created and everything after the # is the SHA256 of the file.
As a result your image will now have the latest version of OnTime and when you run the container it will use it. This way even if you stop and restart the container, it will always use that version.
A quick and dirty trick using volumes
Copy the ontimegc file from the zip file to a location on you machine, e.g. /local/ontime/
I assume that you have used Daniel Nashed startscript to run and configure your server. If this is not the case, then run, clone that repo and use the scripts. One of the scripts is dominoctl, which is used to start and stop Domino and to get to the console. If you run
dominoctl cfg
It will open the config file in edit mode
You should fine something like this inside it : CONTAINER_VOLUMES=”-v /local:/local:z” (it may not have the trailing z:, but that’s only for SELINX so is not a problem is is missing) Change the line to CONTAINER_VOLUMES=”-v /local:/local:z -v /local/ontime/ontimegc:/opt/hcl/notes/lates/linux/ontimegc:z” This means that Domino will use the ontimegc you copied, i.e. the latest version, rather than the one in the original one, the older version.
Save the file and restart the container.
This second method is quicker and has an advantage. When the next release of OnTime becomes available, you just copy the new ontimegc file in the /local/ontime/ directory then restart the container (obviously you will have to use install.nsf to upgrade the databases, but that is not specific to containers)
Initially Sametime 12 supported MongoDB 4.4, so most of the existing installations, at least for my customers, are still running on that version. Now 4.4 is going EOL and is wise to upgrade to the latest version, MongoDB 7.
I have done an upgrade of a production ST 12.0.2 from MongDB 4.4 to 7, without any issues. There are some things you need to be aware of, is not just “next, next, next….” 🙂
First of all MongoDB is NOT like Domino, you can’t upgrade directly from an old version to the latest, you have to go 4.4 -> 5 -> 6 -> 7. Not very nice for us used to Domino, but it is what it is.
7)once updated run the mongod command and pull up the service mongod systemctl start mongod
8)WARNING!
It will fail so stop the service and do the following: systemctl stop mongod rm -rf /tmp/mongodb-27017.sock chown -R mongod:mongod /var/lib/mongo chown -R mongod:mongod /var/log/mongodb chmod R 777 /var/run/mongod systemctl start mongod
For a customer I did the upgrade of Sametime Premium from 12.0.2 to 12.0.2 FP1.
The upgrade itself is uneventful, just run the command ./install and it does everything; as I previously said Sametime is the easiest product to upgrade in the HCL SW portfolio.
But after the upgrade the customer found that he could not access anymore the monitoring dashboard when using the admin console. We found that the upgrade does not keep the existing monitoring.env file but creates a new one, so to log in you have to use the default username and password (admin/admin). Once you log as admin the first time, it will ask you to change the password. Once done that you can edit the file monitoring.env and set the username/password of your choice so you will access the monitoring dashboard without having to manually log in.
