My NWTL Sessions - Verse On Premises

As part of Alan Hamilton’s NWTL (New Way To Learn) initiative, I have recorded sessions on Verse on Premises, the first on Installing and the second on integrating it with Connections. My installation session has been updated into this blog entry for VOP 1.0.1 which shipped today May 8th.  I am sharing that and  my second presentation which is on how to integrate Verse On Premises with IBM Connections.  In my example I use Connections 6 as the instructions are the same as for Connections 5.5 but that isn’t supported by IBM currently to YMMV.

To access all the NWTL sessions if you’re a Business Partner you can register here.  Thank you to Amanda Bauman for recording the session with me.

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Integration Verse On Premises & Connections - Small Problem

This week I have been working on integrating Verse On Premises running on Domino 9.0.1 with IBM Connections.  Alright Connections 6 which isn’t supported right now.  The actual configuration is fairly simple and detailed on one page of IBM documentation.  It involves pasting some CORS redirection lines from the IBM document into your httpd.conf file and then replacing the server hostname with your own.

When I first did it against new servers the profiles integration worked fine but the Files (both accessing and uploading) as well as Follow/Unfollow actions failed.  That pointed fairly clearly to an issue with the OPTIONS request type and firebug confirmed that was throwing a 401 unauthorized error.  Finally I started to run out of ideas and asked Roberto Boccadaro if he could share his httpd.conf with me.  When I compared three separate environments the most glaring difference was with the SetEnvIf variable which is Step 5d on this page

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

IBM’s instructions on that page tell us to use escape characters before each full stop so my variable setting would be

SetEnvIf Origin “^https://(mail\.)?(turtleweb\.com)$”origin_is=$0

However that was the problem.  The https:// caused the 401 error and I had to replace it with escaped forward slashes so my new URL is

SetEnvIf Origin “^https:\/\/(mail\.)?(turtleweb\.com)$”origin_is=$0

I applied that single change and everything immediately worked.

I have let the IBM documentation team know but if you have the same problem, check your SetEnvIf variable.

More Adventures In *** RHEL Configuration

I know I shouldn’t have blogged on Saturday - as soon as I think I have a problem fixed the universe rises up and slaps me roundly about the head.  So fast forward to the end, it’s Sunday night and I’m installing Connections on RHEL 7 so that’s good.  However to get there I had more hurdles which I’ll note here both for myself and for anyone else

I configured and enabled VNC and SSH for access which worked fine on the same network but not from any other network (“Connection Refused”).  The obvious first guess is that the firewall on the server hasn’t been disabled.  It’s always the first thing I do since I have perimeter firewalls between networks and I don’t like to use OS ones. So Saturday and Saturday night was an adventure in checking, double checking and checking again that I had the firewall disabled.  RHEL 7 has replaced iptables with firewalld but iptables still exists so my worry was that I had something enabled somewhere.  I didn’t think it could be my perimeter firewall since I had built the server with the same ip as an earlier server that already worked. My other guess was VNC being accidentally configured with -nolisten but that wasn’t true either.

By the time I went to bed Sunday morning I had ruled out it being the OS and was going to start fresh a few hours later.  I’d also noticed that although I could connect via VNC it was slow as hell despite having a ton of resources.

Sunday morning I decided to delete all the entries referring to that server’s ip on our Sonicwall perimeter device and recreate them.  That fixed the network access. The one thing I didn’t build from scratch was the one thing that was broken. *sigh*.

At this point I did consider switching to Windows 2016 on a new box but I already planned to use that for another server component and wanted to build with mixed OS. Also #stubborn.

So now I have VNC and SSH access but the GUI is awful. I can’t click on most of the menus and it keeps dropping out.  I’m running GNOME 3 and I can find endless posts about problems with GNOME 3 and Cent OS or Redhat so I bite the bullet and install KDE because all I want is a GUI.  KDE is as bad, slow, menus not clickable.  I make sure SELINUX is set to “Disabled” but still no luck.   I try installing NoMachine as an alternative method but that has the same problem with the GUI - slow, unresponding, menus unclickable and eventually a crash with “Oh no!, Something has gone wrong”.  Which isn’t nearly as entertaining the 100th time you see it.  Along the way I disable IPV6 entirely and found and fixed this bug

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=912892

and this one

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=730378

oh and this irritating setting

https://access.redhat.com/solutions/195833 “Authentication is required” prompt

Throughout Sunday I’m continually working with /etc/systemd/system/vncserver@:1.0 to modify the settings, create new instances, create new VNC users but no matter what I try it proves unworkable.

I’m using the Red Hat instructions from here which has a configurator you can use to automatically create the file vncserver@ file according to your settings.  I’m suspicious of that file because it has settings I don’t normally use like  -RANDR so eventually I edit the file and change

ExecStart=/sbin/runuser -l turtlevnc -c \”/usr/bin/vncserver %i -extension RANDR -geometry 1024×768\”
PIDFile=~turtlevnc/.vnc/%H%i.pid

To

ExecStart=/sbin/runuser -l turtlevnc -c “/usr/bin/vncserver %i -geometry 1024×768”
PIDFile=~turtlevnc/.vnc/%H%i.pid
Cleared the /tmp/X11.unix/X? directories and restart once more.  Everything including GNOME 3 works and it’s zippy zippy fast.

 

So. Note to self. Next time remove that RANDR setting and win yourself an entire day back.

 

Me vs Technology (spoiler: I win)

Yesterday Connections 6 shipped and although I was in meetings all day my goal for last night was to get everything downloaded and in place on a VM and have that VM built with a configured and hardened OS.  That was the plan.  I thought it might be fun to share my 4pm - 4am battle against technology and maybe it will help someone else.  It might also explain all the “other” work that tends to take up my time before I  ever get to the actual stuff I’m meant to be installing.

All my servers are hosted in a data centre and mostly I run ESXi boxes with multiple servers on them. I have 5 current ESXi boxes. So first things first, create a new virtual machine on a box with capacity so I can download the software.  All of this is done from a Windows VM on my Mac which connects to Turtle’s data centre

Vsphere lets me create the machine then gives me VMRC disconnected when I try and open a console.  After some checking I realise it’s the older ESXi boxes that are throwing that error for every VM and only since I upgraded to Windows 10.  If I can’t open a console on the VM I can’t do anything so I search the internet for various random advice which included

  • Disable anti virus
  • Remove Vsphere
  • Install latest Vsphere (which keeps being overwritten with an older one each time I connect to an older machine)
  • Uninstall VMware Converter (which I had forgotten was even there) - that required me booting into safe mode in my VM which only worked if I used msconfig to get it to restart in safe mode
  • Downgrade Windows
  • Create a new clean desktop VM to install Vsphere into

This is a bigger problem than just this install because I also can’t manage any of my servers on those boxes.  I rarely connect to them via the console so I don’t know how long it’s been like that but it can’t stay like that.

Several hours later.. still no luck. Vsphere lets me do everything to a virual machine except open a console.  I could use another ESXi box but I’m being stubborn at this point. I want to use this box

Then I find reference to VGC - Virtual Guest Console  https://labs.vmware.com/flings/vgc.  Created in VMWare labs in 2010 and still in “beta” it does one thing I need which is open a console.  So now I have VSphere where I can create and manage the instances and the VGC to open a console I’m ready to install and OS.

But which OS?  The host boxes have ISOs on them I already use but those are Windows 2012 R2 and RHEL 6.4.  I want either Windows 2016 or RHEL 7.1  Again I could use Windows 2012 but #stubborn.

I download Windows 2016 to my Mac and it’s over 5GB.  That’s going to take a few hours to upload to the datastore and I’m optimistically thinking I don’t have a few hours to waste.  So Plan B is that I take an existing RHEL 6.4 ISO and use that to install then upgrade it to 7.1 in place since you can now do that with Redhat if you’re moving from the latest 6.x to 7.x.  Top tip - it would have been quicker to upload Windows 2016.

I start building the new VM using RHEL 6.4 and eventually I get to the point where I can tell it to get all updates and off it goes.  It’s now 1am and it’s showing 19/1934 updates.  So.. I go to bed taking my iPad with me and leaving my laptop downstairs.  Once I’m in bed I can use Jump on the iPad to connect to my laptop which is on the same network and Terminus and the VPN on the iPad to open a putty session to the data centre.  The 6.4 updates finish and now I need to get it to 7.1  First thing I need to do is download 7.1 directly to that new VM which I can do easily because I installed a browser so I download the 3GB ISO directly to the VM which only takes 3 minutes and I’m ready to install.

Except not quite.  Redhat requires to you run their pre upgrade utility before doing an inplace upgrade.  In fact the upgrade won’t even run until you run pre-upgrade.  So I do that and as expected it fails a bunch of stuff that I don’t care about because this is a new machine and I’m not using anything yet so I’m not bothered if something stops working.  Except the upgrade still won’t run because it spots I failed the pre upgrade test.  That’s where “redhat-upgrade-tool -f” comes in.  Around 4am I left that running and got some sleep.

Incidentally this is a great document on upgrading but I think you may need a login to read it https://access.redhat.com/solutions/637583

At 7am I found it completed at RHEL 7.1 and then ran one more update to make sure everything was on the latest patches,  added the GUI and configured the firewall.

I’m NOW ready to download Connections 6