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An important warning when using DAOS with Domino 8.5.2

When you intend to start your DAOS rollout using the recently released Domino 8.5.2, you will get a warning, when the DAOS repository is located under the Domino data directory. Having the DAOS repository in this location is not a recommended configuration.

Domino will show a warning

And IBM makes it very, very clear that they do not want you to put your .NLOs relative to the data directory by showing this warning at least 5 times when the document is opened for editing and another 6 times when saving and closing the server document.

If you are an administrator, don’t bother. It turned out to be a reproducable bug that will get fixed in 8.5.3. If you are a developer, look into the input validation of the DAOSBasePath item in the server\server form and fix it on your own.

IBM’s John Paganetti commented this with “Guess we really don’t want you to put under data directory anymore… ”

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[8.5.2] – Upgrading multiple local databases to a new ODS

Lotus Notes / Domino 8.5.2 provides a new feature to upgrade multiple local databases to a new ODS.

This document contains information that is not contained in the help files shipped with Lotus Notes / Domino 8.5.2.

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JAddIn – Java Toolkit for Domino Add-In Server Tasks (Freeware)

“Do you need to write a Domino add-in task in Java? The JAddIn frameworks greatly helps you to create Java tasks for Domino by freeing you to learn all the Domino add-in specifics. It supports all Domino server versions since 7.0 on all platforms and processor architectures.”

more …

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Lotus Notes / Domino 8.5.2 Fixlist

Lotus Notes / Domino 8.5.2 is just around the corner. GA has been announced for 24-August-2010. The fixlist is already available and contains almost 1.500 fixes. One of my favourites is:

DWON84BSU3 Fixed issue with Sametime Chat status text being displayed in Portuguese instead of Brazilian Portuguese.

Didn’t know that there is such a big difference in language …

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I’ll be speaking at AdminCamp 2010

I will do two sessions at this years Admin Camp 2010.

Admin Camp is a 3 days ad free conference held from 20. – 22 September 2010 in Gelsenkirchen, Germany.

The organizers put together an impressive agenda. They invited national and international speakers. Paul Mooney, Christian Henseler, Andrew Pollack and also IBMers Collin Murray and Bernd Schindler, just to name a few.

And for the first time,  Andy Pedisich is on the speakers list.

According to the agenda, I will start on monday and talk about “Compact, Compress, De-Duplicate”. The session will show, how to save space on your Domino using the tools provided by the product.

If you cannot attend or miss this session, you have a second chance at the ILUG conference in Belfast later this year.

The second session on tuesday is about Sametime 8.5.1. I had prepared the session for Sametime 8.5 but rewrote it to cover the new version.

It is a step-by-step guide to setup and run Sametime 8.5.1 on a Linux box. Most of the content is also valid for a Windows environment. If my 160 slides are not enough to fill up 90 minutes, I can also do some live demos.

Hope to see you at the conference. Not yet booked? Do it now …

Update: I’m aware that there is a typo in the screenshot for the first session. must be 09 instead of 11

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Sametime 8.5.1 – no luck with debug

I recently had an issue with photos in businesscards in my “Lab” Sametime 8.5.1 installtion on SLES 10.3. I had configured names.nsf as source for the picture in my dual repository configuration. This configuration works in a productive environment with Sametime 8.5 Community Server on Windows 8.5FP1 ( + HF GHEU-854LD9 that addresses an issue wth pictures in business cards )

After upgrading my “Lab” from Sametime 8.5 to 8.5.1 ( including an upgrade of Domino to 8.5.1 FP4 Linux ) the business card still showed an old picture. I had recently replaced the picture in my person record. So I deleted the person cache by deleting the C:\Program Files\IBM\Lotus\Notes\Data\workspace\.metadata\.plugins\com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.people.impl folder on my computer.

Did a “Refresh Person Info” in the embedded Samtime client but  the new picture did not show up.

I looked into the latest UserInfoSA file in the trace folder on the Domino server to find out what went wrong and found the following entry

SEVERE | Thread-14 ] : UserInfoLogger : error : extractImage Exception: Exception:
class com.ibm.sametime.userinfo.userinfobb.ImageExtractor$ImageNotFoundException

Not a very helpful error message, because I know that the image exists in the person document and the previous image was found.
I tried to find out more and turned Debug mode. I copied Debug.Level.class.5 from /opt/IBM/notesdata/domino/html/sametime/stlinks/debug to /opt/IBM/notesdata.

By the way, the documentation says “To enable trace collection, a debugLevel.class file compiled to level 3 and higher should be added to the folder that contains the UserInfo.jar file.”.
This seems not to work on Linux; I restarted the server including the OS but no message “Debug Level changed to: 5″ appeared in the console. After moving the file to the data directory and restarting the machine once again, the debug level changes. /opt/IBM/notesdata contains a symbolic link to UserInfo.jar.

I once again cleared the cache and tried to retrieve the photo. nada … Now the UserInfoSA was completely empty with zero byte filelength.

I verified reproduceability by changing the debug settings back and forth. The issue with the zero byte file is reproduceable.

But still no hint, why the picture is missing from the business card.
I then decided to replace the UserInfo.jar from the Sametime 8.5.1 installation by the one from the Hotfix. After I restarted the server once more, I found the following info in UserInfoSA

[08/13 8:44:35.929] Thread-12 User: CN=Ulrich Krause/O=singultus found in database names.nsf
[08/13 8:44:35.930] Thread-12 Found detail: Photo. reqid=1
[08/13 8:44:35.930] Thread-12 Entering extractImage
[08/13 8:44:35.931] Thread-12 document size 10 KB
[08/13 8:44:35.950] Thread-12 export document to XML is now completed.
[08/13 8:44:35.969] Thread-12 extractImage Exception:
com.ibm.sametime.userinfo.userinfobb.ImageExtractor$ImageNotFoundException: Image file type not supported: 34×48.jpg

Aha, “Image file type not supported: 34×48.jpg” This is a valuable information.
I looked into the person record and saw that the image is named eknori.34×48.jpg. I then replaced the attachment by eknori.jpg and now the image is displayed in the business card.

The log file now contains

[08/13 8:47:07.740] Thread-13 document size 18 KB
[08/13 8:47:07.755] Thread-13 export document to XML is now completed.
[08/13 8:47:07.759] Thread-13 Image found. Mime type is: image/jpeg
[08/13 8:47:07.766] Thread-13 Constracted DetailItem id=Photo fieldname=photo type=image/jpeg

Now that I have found the cause, I replaced UserInfo.jar with the the original one and tested again. The picture displays and the tracefile has a non-zero length.
Here is what it says

[ 09:06:51.748 | 13.08.2010 | SEVERE | Thread-12 ] : UserInfoLogger : error : Image found. Mime type is: image/jpeg

Conclusion
1. the attachment for the picture must not contain more than one dot; obviously the servlet splits the filename after the first dot and therefore cannot find the file

2. Something is wrong with DebugLevel.class file. Either the problem is caused by the new UserInfo.jar im Sametime 8.5.1 or the file has not been updated by the installer

Both issues should be checked with support. Perhaps someone can do the same tests on a Windows system. But let me make a guess: I am the only one in the whole wide world that has these issues …

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I’ll be speaking at ILUG

A few minutes ago, I got an e-mail saying:

Your ILUG session: “Compact, Compress, De-Duplicate” has been accepted.

I’ve already booked flight and hotel a few weeks ago and now I have to start to prepare my session.

OK, so let’s see … File – New – Presentation …

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Yellow Day 2010 – Trouble with policies?

Have you created a policy and do not think it has been assigned to a user or group?

Are policies not in effect for Community Server users that you have configured in the Sametime System Console?


Then you should check your sametime.ini. Search for POLICY_DB_BB_IMPL=

If the result is

POLICY_DB_BB_IMPL=com.ibm.sametime.policy.databasebb.notes.DbNotesBlackBox

replace it with

POLICY_DB_BB_IMPL=com.ibm.sametime.policy.databasebb.xml.DbXmlBlackBox

The first line reads the policy from stpolicy.nsf and the second line ready the policy from policies.user.xml that acts as a cache between the Community Server and the Sametime System Console server.

Happy Yellow Day 2010 everybody !!

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Sametime 8.5.1 – Startscripts now by default

Just finished a Sametime 8.5.1 installation on SLES 10. The clean install was painless and ran without any issues.

For Sametime 8.5 I wrote my own shellscript to start and stop the different components of the Sametime installation automatically at startup.

In 8.5.1, IBM creates the start/stop scripts during installation. The only thing you have to do is to enable the services in runlevel editor.

I do not know, if this also works in a Windows environment. If anyone has information, please leave a comment.

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Upgrading from Sametime 8.5 to 8.5.1? – Read this

If you have Sametime 8.5 installed and you intend to upgrade to the new 8.5.1 release, then you might be encountered with an error that will neither let you upgrade your meeting server and media management installation nor allow a new installation.

I wrote about the problem earlier in in this blog and it took me almost 3 days to figure out what is going on, so this tipp can save you a lot of time.

Both, meeting server and media manager are installed using a deployment plan that binds to an LDAP directory.

If you don’t have changed the person’s search and/ or authentication attributes in the the LDAP configuration in SSC, you will be able to do the upgrade or a clean install without problems.

But if you have changed the athentication attributes and added displayname to field for instance, then the installation or the upgrade will fail.

In 8.5.1 the field validation for the attributes obviously have changed.

You have to revert to the standard attribut settings to be able to successfully update your Sametime  8.5 installation.

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8 hours, 33 minutes, 28 seconds

I installed FP4 for Lotus Notes 8.5.1 today on my office pc. Its a Lenovo R500, 4GB RAM with Windows 7 Ultimate (64Bit). I’ve already heard from others that there are some “timing problems” with the recent fixpack. But I never expected this

Anyone more ??

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Least Privilege Security for Windows 7, Vista, XP – New Book from PACKT Publishing

This book written by Russel Smith and published by PACKT Publishing in July 2010 contains detailed step-by-step instructions for implementing Least Privilege Security and related management technologies.

It has solutions to the most common technical challenges and Microsoft best practice advice. It also covers techniques for managing Least Privilege on the desktop.

About the Author: Russell Smith specializes in management and security of Microsoft-based IT systems and is a Contributing Editor for CDW’s Biztech magazine and writes regularly for industry journal Windows IT Professional. Russell is also contributing author to Supporting and Troubleshooting Applications on a Microsoft Windows Vista Client for Enterprise Support Technicians from Microsoft’s Official Academic Course (MOAC) series of books published by Wiley and Sons. he is an independent IT consultant and MCSE with more than ten years of experience. Russell’s recent projects include Active Directory Security Consultant for the UK Health Service National Programme for Information Technology (NPfIT) and Exchange Architect for Wipro Technologies. Russell also has extensive experienceas an IT trainer.


What you will learn from this book

• Explore the principle of Least Privilege Security and implement it across different versions of Microsoft Windows
• Overcome the most common technical challenges of implementing Least Privilege Security on the desktop
• Apply Least Privilege Security to different categories of users and get buy-in from management
• Identify any potential compatibility problems with Least Privilege Security and software installed on networked PCs using Microsoft’s Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT)
• Prepare a desktop image with Least Privilege Security enabled from the start and deploy the new image while preserving users’ files and settings
• Configure User Account Control on multiple computers using Group Policy
• Modify incompatible applications and achieve the best balance between compatibility and security by using Application Compatibility shims
• Deploy applications using Group Policy Software Installation (GPSI) and Windows Installer and create MSI wrappers for legacy setup programs
• Install per-machine ActiveX Controls using the ActiveX Installer Service (AxIS)
• Deploy default Software Restriction Policy (SRP) or AppLocker rules to ensure only programs installed in protected locations can run and blacklist applications using SRP or AppLocker

If you are a System Administrator or desktop support staff who want to implement Least Privilege Security on Windows systems, this book is the right choice for you. It covers on 465 pages almost everything you need to know about Least Privilege Security for Windows 7, Vista, XP.

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More Sametime frustration

The new Sametime 8.5.1 Meeting Server and Media Manager still refuses to install or upgrade. So I decided to re-install the recently unregistered and uninstalled Media Manager 8.5.

I started to create a new deployment plan because the previous plan was intended for version 8.5.1. There is now a dropdown where you can select the version for which you want to create the deployment plan.

So far, so good. I must have looked damm ned stupid when I wanted to connect to the commuity server within the deployment plan.
Nothing is offered to me at this stage. Somehow logically, I have already updated the Community Server to version 8.5.1.
Therefore I cancelled at this point and tried to install the media server 8.5 using a 8.5.1 deployment plan.

The connection to SSC was successful and the list of deployment plans was loaded. It was … empty.

So, that was it. Fazit after several hours frustration:

You cannot install or upgrade Sametime 8.5.1 Media Manager because because it fails to update the status in SSC after almost one hour of installation, and you cannot install 8.5 Media Manager when you already have updated the Community Server to 8.5.1 because you can not create an appropriate community plan. The same applies to the Meeting Server.

Any advice, what to do?

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Sametime 8.5.1 upgrade

I have downloaded all the necessary files yesterday and started the upgrade earlier today.

It went fine for the System Console Server, the Community Server and the Proxy Server. All components are now running on version 8.5.1. on Linux.

I have some problems upgrading Meeting Server and Media Manager Server. I have described the error here. If anyone has an idea how to solve the issue; much appreciated.

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Location is important – really

For a few days now, I tried to get Business Cards working in Sametime 8.5 using a dual repository ( LDAP / DominoApplication). I red almost all articles in the samtime wiki and in the sametime forum and was sure that my configuration was correct and should work. But nada. The LDAP part worked, but the Domino part didn’t.

So I turned on debug to see what was going wrong. I copied the Debug.Level.5 file to the Domino root directory and restarted the machine. The trace file was created but did not contain any hint regarding the issue.

Today, due to some frustration, I decided to reinstall the Domino and Sametime installation. I also decided to keep the standard installation paths and only changed the drive letter during setup.  During the initial setup, I installed the domino binaries into d:\domino and the data files into d:\dominodata. I did this kind of install several times ( I don’t like long pathnames) and it always worked without any error.

After all setup was done and the server came up, I watched the console and to my surprise, I saw the following

Debug level set to 5. … never saw that before after initializing debug.

And now the trace file shows, what is going wrong:

[08/03 10:05:59.468] Thread-23 document size 22 KB
[08/03 10:05:59.468] Thread-23 extractImage Exception:
java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.ibm.sametime.userinfo.userinfobb.ImageExtractor.documentSizeNotValid(Unknown Source)
at com.ibm.sametime.userinfo.userinfobb.ImageExtractor.extractImage(Unknown Source)
at com.ibm.sametime.userinfo.userinfobb.UserInfoNotesNsfBB.storeRetrievedValues(Unknown Source)

Well, shortly after, Rene Winkelmeyer pointed me to this thread in the Sametime Forum.

And as a conclusion, it seems to be important in some cases that the data directory is located inside the domino directory.

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Configuring Sametime 8.5.1 Media and Proxy Servers with an 8.0.2 Community Server using Sametime System Console

This article by Jack Downing and Michael Herring describes how to use the Sametime System Console to configure your 8.5.1 Sametime servers with an 8.0.2 Community server.

The article is also a good ressource when you have to troubleshoot a community server installation, because it describes some configuration files that are worth looking  into.

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Book Preview: Least Privilege Security for Windows 7, Vista and XP

Least Privilege Security is the practice of assigning users and programs the minimum permissions required to complete a given task. Implementing this principle in different versions of Microsoft Windows requires careful planning and a good understanding of Windows security. While there are benefits in implementing Least Privilege Security on the desktop, there are many technical challenges that you will face when restricting privileges.

In our company, we are about to plan the rollout for Windows 7, so this book sounds interesting to me. Packt Publishing has promised to send me a copy of this book in return for a review. I’m looking forward to receiving it.

To get a first impression of the content and it’s quality, here is a link to Chapter No. 3 – Solving Least privilege Problems with the Application Compatibility Toolkit .

Happy reading!

By the way, have you heard about “Packt’s Business-to-Business campaign” ? If not, follow this link for further information …

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How to transfer working sets in Domino Designer to a different machine

Found this information in the IBM Lotus Knowledgebase ( Technote #1438255 )

The working sets information is kept in a file called workingsets.xml in the following location in your Notes installation folder:

Notes\Data\workspace\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.ui.workbench

Copy this file to the new Domino Designer client in the same location while Domino Designer is not running. When you next start up Domino Designer the working sets will be available and matching the previous client.

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Sametime 8.5 frustration

I have done a some 15 sametime installations over the past few month. Most of them to prepare a session for the upcoming AdminCamp in Gelsenkirchen later this year. All installation are on Linux.

I have also setup a productive environment for our company which runs fine except a few issues.

• During the past 2 weeks our community server ( the only component taht is still running on Windows ) constantly crashes every few hours. It does not really crash but it seems that all of the ST* services are stopped at once and then restart. The services all show a status of “started” after such a “crash” but noone is able to connect to the community server. The only way to get it to work again is to restart the whole server.

There are no clues in the log and nobody is able to explain his very strange behaviour.

• I tried to uninstall Sametime 8.5 embedded from my 8.5.1 FP3 client using setup.exe /v”EMBEDDED_UNINSTALL=true”

  After I restarted the client sametime 8.5 embedded was still in place. The only way to uninstall Sametime 8.5 and revert back to embedded Sametime 8.0.2 was to completly uninstall Lotus Notes and install the client after restart.

  I have posted this in the Lotus Sametime Forum but no answer. OK there is an answer but not confirmed in any way from IBM side.

No problem if it is a bug. But then pls. confirm.

• Am I the only one who gets

  org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethodBase getResponseBody
  WARNUNG: Going to buffer response body of large or unknown size. Using getResponseBodyAsStream instead is recommended.

  warning messages on the community server console on Linux. I don’t think so. Also posted this in the Sametime Forum. No answer so far.

No problem if this is not a relevant issue. But then pls. at least give a short feedback.

• The next one is with group authentication and assign policies to group when using LDAP. Good to know that there is a hotfix available.

  Why is this one not posted on fixcentral?

  And another strange thing about this issue is that the problem does not occur on one of two identically installed machines.

No explaination, no hint where to look into to find a clue.

Another question that I asked in the Sametime Forum is about re-installing a (registered) community server.

No answer so far. The only hint comes from another admin / user / customer. And to be honest. If uninstalling the whole installation including all other components the community server is registered with is the (only) solution , then there must be something wrong with the concept.

There are many more issues I ran into like grayed out icons in the IC ( although the option is checked in the policy ), and “community must be defined as Standard Community” ( although the option is unchecked in the policy ) where I cannot find any hint on how to solve neither in the Knowledge Base nor in the Samtime WiKi or Forum.

At least a short (official) response to my posts would have been great; just to know that someone who is responsible for the product cares about it.

At the moment I am a little bit frustrated. Shall I call a consultant?  Oh, wait better a whole buch of consultants, because “one consultant is no consultant”. What will I tell my boss the next time he asks me if we can start to rollout Sametime in the organization? “Great product, but … “.

I know that it is all my fault that I ran into the problems. And maybe my biggest fault is that I am not a native english speaker and not able to describe my problems with Sametime in a way a first level supporter in Babudistanki / Pamplonistan can understand.

If you never had the described issues, great for you. But if you have seen at least one of the problems and have a solution or workaround, pls. share your knowledge. Any help is appreciated.

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(Another) Startup script for Sametime 8.5 on Linux

If you are running Sametime 8.5 either on Windows or on Linux you need to create some script to start all components automatically on server startup. Michael Urspringer has already done this for Windows and Enio Basso contributed a script for Linux.

In addition, Sasa Brkic recently posted a script to start the DB2 server on Linux.

I have also written such a script earlier this year that has some additional options.

You can either start  stop or restart the whole Sametime 8.5 server or only selected components. And you can get the status of for example the meeting server by typing

./sametime status meeting

at the shell console.

Download: sametime

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