A Portal to a Portal

WASService.exe -add nodeagent -serverName nodeagent -profilePath p:\IBM\WebSphere\wp_profile -startType automatic

One of our customers, James, drew my attention to this Technote: -

As an aide-memoire to myself, as most of my blog postings are, I hit this exception today: -

"JVMJ9VM011W Unable to load j9jit23"
"JVMJ9VM011W Unable to load jclscar_23: cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied"

etc.

when running Java-based WebSphere commands such as versionInfo.sh and WPVersionInfo.sh, even though WebSphere Portal 6.1.5 had installed and started without problems ( this being on a 64-bit instance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 ).

which led me to this semi-related Technote: -

Impact 5.1 is not starting on any Security-enhanced Linux (SELinux) system

which helped resolve the problem - in my case, I chose to "tell" my current user's shell to ignore SELinux, via the command: -

setenforce 0

but I could have as easily disabled it by setting "SELINUX=disabled" in the /etc/selinux/config and then rebooting.

Two great postings in less than a day: -

Portal failing to start for no obvious reason

Lotus Connections and Oracle on Solaris

and there's more coming, so head over to http://dilftechnical.blogspot.com/

This comes under the heading of serendipitous searching - I found this whilst I was looking for something completely different: -

Examples of good looking public sites using WebSphere Portal

I hit an interesting problem last week where I was finding that the Lotus Forms sample portlets were failing to render, with the error: -

One of my IBM US colleagues, Richard Robbins, hit a problem with the Web Application Integrator portlet and WebSphere Portal 6.1.5 / 6.1.3.0.

This document contains links to new information and current key technical support documents for IBM WebSphere Portal and IBM Lotus Web Content Management (WCM) that are frequently requested or identified by IBM as valuable. This is key information to help you derive the most value from software licenses, find answers to common questions, and work through current issues that might affect your environment.

Saw this from Adrian Sutton via the power of Twitter, so thought I'd share it here as well: -

here is a document that I pulled together last year showing how to use the WebSphere Portal ConfigWizard to hook Domino LDAP in as a Federated Repository.

Will get around to writing up same for WP615 and also for the ConfigEngine scripts, which I'm getting to love more and more ...

After a number of years out on loan, an old IBM Ideascan USB scanner came back into my life, and after a few weeks of dust-gathering, I decided to pull it into use for a particular project on which we were working.

Trouble is - I bought the scanner back in the 90s and it was a Windows-only device, and I don't use Windows any more ( as most readers will know ).

No problems, I thought, the Mac will just recognise it .... #FAIL, the Mac did not recognise the scanner, and a Google search didn't suggest a short-term solution.

Thankfully, I have a number of PCs running Ubuntu. I plugged in the scanner and .... no joy there either.

Thankfully, a further Google search led me to George Notaras' blog G-Loaded Journal which, in a few simple steps, showed me how to add support for the scanner, using the Viceo drivers, which I was able to add to the stock SANE tool that Ubuntu uses for scanning etc.

The actual blog thread is here: -

Viceo Backend for SANE with libusb support

One thing; using scanimage, I did see: -

scanimage: WARNING: read more data than announced by backend (2979990/2977443)

with a similar message appearing when I used xsane.

Nice one, George, that saved another bit of kit from going in the skip ...

My IBM colleagues, En Hui Chen and Chao Feng Yang, have produced a potentially very useful document showing how IBM Tivoli Access Manager for e-Business ( aka TAMeB ) can be used to secure Lotus Connections, via a "front-end" reverse web proxy server.

Having spent some time playing around with the new blog and wiki templates in WP/WCM 6.1.5, one of my clients asked how a non-administrative user could create new blogs and add comments to existing blogs.

I realised that, in my limited exposure to the new components ( which are a very clever combination of portal page automation - creating new pages and adding components via a very nice GUI - and Lotus WCM content and resource libraries ), I'd done everything as the wpsadmin ID, which isn't particularly useful outside of my own Ubuntu-based demonstration environment.

Therefore, I dug into things a little bit more, and wrote up the following: -

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In order to meet the requirement of a non-admin user creating/editing blogs, you'd need to add the required additional users/groups to the Editor role of the WCM library that forms the basis of the blog itself.

As an example, I created a new page called My Blogs, and then used the Blog Template library to create a blogging site called Blog-o-matic ( I did this via the Edit Page -> Customise -> Add Blog Library dialogue, as the portal administrator - wpsadmin ).

This allowed me to create blogs within the library, and add posts and comments. Other users could see the page/blog library/blogs/comments, but weren't able to create their own blogs etc.

Therefore, as wpsadmin, I navigated to the Administration page, and selected Portal Content -> Web Content Libraries and then clicked the Set Permissions button. From the Resource Permissions page, I then hit the Edit Role button for the Editor role and, in my case, added the "group" All Authenticated Portal Users to that role.

This means that any portal user can now log in, access the My Blogs page, create a new blog, view and comment upon other people's blogs etc.

Depending upon your requirements, you may want to restrict the usage of certain blogs to certain user groups ( in LDAP ) rather than using All Authenticated Portal Users.

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And it looks sweet  ..

And here's a screenshot, by popular demand :-

Whilst helping out a friend, Mike, with a Lotus Mobile Connect on Ubuntu issue, I realised that I'd never actually written the solution up.

Mike was connected, via LMC to a VPN within the company network, whilst being connected to the intranet via a wired connection. All was well, apart from the fact that he was then unable to log in to the Sametime server that's on the intranet.

When we checked, it appeared that the LMC connection was updating the DNS name resolution ( on Linux, this is driven by the /etc/resolv.conf file ).

The solution ?

a) Disconnect from LMC
b) Open a command prompt
c) Navigate to the directory - /home/<USERNAME>/.wclient
d) Edit the file - connX.conf - where X is the number of the LMC connection needing change e.g. 0 for the first connection, 1 for the second connection etc.
e) Change GatewaySuppliesDNS=1 to GatewaySuppliesDNS=0
f) Save the file and reconnect via LMC

Having done this, Mike was able to connect to the VPN'd hosts via LMC whilst also connecting to Sametime, Notes etc. via the normal intranet.

Seemples !!