Monthly Archives: July 2020

07.30.20
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Guest and Anonymous Access

HCL have today announced their new Complete Collaboration (CCB) licensing model - see here for the full details and an explanation from Uffe Sorensen , Global Director of DS Stragey. I wanted to highlight some key points as they make a big difference to how many of you may choose to license Domino and associated products.

  • The CCB per user per month model which allows you to use any of the client products with as many servers that you need with no further charge is now extended to include what HCL are calling “Guest” access.
  • There are now two types of Guest users that do not need to be explicitly licensed, Anonymous web access users and Guest users who can authenticate but are limited to “Depositor” access in the ACL of any database
  • The Anonymous entitlement grants read only access to your websites and removes the need for the Utility server that was previously licensed by a complex PVU calculation under IBM
  • Guest access enables things like surveys and other data collection systems using Domino web applications

This streamlining of the licensing and expansion of the Guest model makes Domino a very appealing option for publishing your websites with no additional per user cost. A nice job by HCL in listening to their customers and working to come up with a solution.

07.02.20
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Sametime Proxy “Loading” Problem

Having recently installed a new Sametime 11 environment on Linux with Sametime Proxy I ran into a problem with the proxy client where it would continually show “loading” when starting a conversation. Awareness of users on other servers worked, type ahead worked, it would open a chat window but just show a looping circle that never ended. Even if I tried talking to myself (usually a good test).

I have been working with HCL for a few days on this and it seemed to point to an issue with Mongodb as they found a failure to connect in the logs. That was odd because Mongo is installed on the same server as the ST Community server and was binding to localhost on 127.0.0.1, it didn’t appear to have any problems but the chatlogging service couldn’t connect so the Sametime Proxy clients wouldn’t work. It’s worth knowing what I subsequently found out which is that if the chat logging service doesn’t start up correctly, the Sametime clients will continue to work but the Sametime Proxy clients won’t.

Thanks to HCL identifying that the issue was with Mongo, I got it fixed and here are the changes I made.

Wanting Mongo to bind to the fqhn of the machine not localhost - originally I edited /etc/mongo.conf to use bindIpAll to bind all ips and that should have worked but instead I ended up using bindIP to explicitly bind the mongo service to the ip that the fqhn resolved to. That worked but to access the mongo console I had to then type “mongo -host fqhn” .. if I just typed “mongo” I’d get connection refused as it would default to using 127.0.0.1.

Now Mongodb was listening on the right port and hostname I had two other places to change in Sametime so they matched. The sametime.ini MONGO_URI setting and the chatlogging.ini CL_MONGO_HOST setting.

With all of that set I restarted Sametime and the proxy worked fine.