Category Archives: General

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.

06.17.20
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Some Stumbles Installing Sametime 11 FP1

This week I was installing Sametime v11 on Linux as a test for a customer where I needed to confirm code written specifically for Windows would compile and work for Sametime on Linux. I hit several (now resolved) problems during the install that I wanted to share here.

Environment: RHEL 8.2 , no GUI, MongoDB, Domino v11 (not FP1), Sametime v11 FP1 Community Server

After installing Sametime v11 using the silent install option (edit the installer.properties file in the install “Server” directory and use the -i silent switch when running install.bin), the Domino console threw continual java errors trying to load staddin.

I did have the missing / broken symlinks similar to Darren Duke’s post here (not all the same ones but many of them) however once that was fixed I thought to go straight to upgrading to FP1.

On upgrading to FP1 (which can use the console installer) the program first uninstalls v11 then installs FP1. It said it completed successfully but when starting Domino and staddin I saw lots of errors about missing jar files. I checked the files and saw not only were the directories servlet , cgi-bin and html now entirely missing from /local/notesdata/domino many of the sametime files in /local/notesdata (ls -l st*) were suddenly missing too.

So something was wrong. I thought to uninstall and do over but unfortunately the uninstaller.bin didn’t exist (neither did the _uninst directory). So I opted to reinstall v11 over v11 FP1 again which worked and put all the missing files and folders back, I took copies of them then installed FP1 again and this time it did work. Sort of - I still got a NSD on launch.

The NSD was being generated by staddin trying to load the stchatlogging library which was strange, Mongo installed fine and was running, I set the logging criteria correctly in stconfig.nsf so I was at a loss. I opened a PMR and they found that the error was in the server not finding the stchatlogging.nsf database. Well that database was definitely present and I could get at it BUT the ACL looked completely wrong (see below) it looked like the ACL of a template not a database. I cleaned up the ACL and also put the Sametime server in it explicitly and everything then loaded perfectly.

So I got there in the end but it’s worth knowing that I got no errors on any of the installs, all of them said they completed successfully. Hopefully this saves some of you some time.

04.02.20
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A couple of important 11.0.1 technotes

Domino and Notes 11.0.1 is now available for download and there’s some really nice new long awaited features including SNI - here’s a full list of new features but first I wanted to highlight a couple of technotes related to 11.0.1 regression bugs that were found too close too shipping and will be fixed in IF1. Many of you will be unaffected by these but they are worth knowing about now.

Some Domino Designer crash behaviour when performing specific actions https://support.hcltechsw.com/csm?id=kb_article&sysparm_article=KB0077621

Error ” Illegal Null Parameter Passed To Security Function” when trying to add or remove vault replica servers from the ID Vault configuration https://support.hcltechsw.com/csm?id=kb_article&sysparm_article=KB0077500

03.06.20
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Engage Redux

This week we were at Engage in the Netherlands presenting, learning and meeting up with customers and friends. Another big thank you to Theo, Hilde and Femke for all the work they put into this event, by my count of hands during the keynote around 20% of attendees were there for the first time which is fantastic.

The word of the conference from HCL was “Evolve” and even I came away surprised by several of the technical projects HCL have progressed, including Volt, Sametime and Nomad for web. Each of those deserve their own blog entry so I’m publishing those individually alongside this one.

Sametime Meetings

Nomad Web

My presentation at Engage was around the delivery of the Discussions template for Nomad phone and tablet, a project I have been co-ordinating since last year. We had more technical issues with the projector and cables than I’d like, so thank you if you came along and watched the purple-tinged version, and here is the original. There is also a technote published by HCL on Wednesday containing both the template and a whitepaper detailing the design and code elements. I hope you find it useful https://t.co/o4LtwQo8jk.

01.16.20
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Apple Stuff Up Books AGAIN

Here we go again. My iPad had to be replaced under warranty this week (it was only intermittently charging) so that meant all 4500+ books had to download from the cloud once more. It took about two days but down they came about 50/50 bought from Apple/Amazon. I immediately noticed that several of my books, all of them Amazon epubs, were missing their covers. So…

  • Off I go to iBooks on my Mac to verify if the covers were still there. They were.
  • I then try the trick of adding a new cover to a book (just drag and drop an image onto the book in iBooks - that made no difference to the iPad.
  • Then I tried removing the download on my iPad and redownloading - it again came down with no cover
  • I tried deleting the books from iBooks entirely and re-adding them - they disappeared from iPad and reappeared. Still with no covers.

Apparently Catalina has broken syncing. If you add epubs to iBooks then have them sync to the cloud and then iOS the covers often disappear. The reverse, syncing from iOS to Catalina works fine. This only applies to non Apple epubs (which is about half my book purchases). Here’s what I did to fix it

  • Download the Kindle book
  • Remove the DRM so I can use it / back it up
  • Drag the book to my iCloud on the Mac
  • Open “Files” on the iPad and download the book that is now showing in iCloud. iOS will open the downloaded book in iBooks, correctly showing the cover and then sync that back to iBooks cloud and onto my Mac.

It’s not a difficult solution now I know it’s there but it’s concerning how badly Apple are breaking iBooks on OSX when a primary reason for investing in their technology is the cohesive ecosystem.

11.03.19
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Remember when Apple “just worked”

*The below are issues with Apple’s cloud services, I have zero doubt that same issues would occur and do occur with Android and Microsoft. The problem is the concept of cloud storage and DRM*

I have been an Apple user for about 20 years. I like the ecosystem because I do tech support for a living so when it’s my own work and life I don’t want to have to troubleshoot. For years that was true. I had Macs, iPhones and iPads and it’s still my preferred approach, I would stick with the Mac ecosystem over anything else but it no longer “just works”. You may remember my blog earlier this year about issues with the Cloud that broke my Mac until I turned off Cloud syncing entirely

https://turtleblog.info/2019/04/08/more-apple-cloud-issues-the-solution/

Well that wasn’t the end of my problems. Recently I have been preparing to travel and that meant making sure I had the music I wanted on my phone. Since 2001 Tim has been creating 2 or 3 playlists a year to replace the mixtapes we used to have. I now have over 50 playlists of music that has been important to us in the past few decades. Our music was converted from CDs we owned or sometimes bought digitally and we had over 100GB of it synced.

Note my use of the past tense “had”. Yep I discovered a couple of weeks ago that although my playlists were there they were suddenly all empty. In fact all my music had disappeared and synced that disapperance across every device. I didn’t notice right away because I have been streaming new music recently but when I did notice it was too late to fix it. All my music, all of it, was gone. That’s why the playlists were empty.

Luckily Tim had exported the playlists last year Unfortunately they were txt files and Apple can now only import XML files as playlists. I found a site that can convert text playlists to other formats like Apple Music, Spotify, Youtube etc but when I tried to do that it “matched” the music with stuff in the Apple Music cloud getting the wrong versions of songs or just the wrong songs entirely. Back to square one.

We do have backups but it seems like the music had gradually been disappearing since last April when my cloud account got corrupted. Apple’s level of support at this point comes down to telling you to reformat whatever device you have and “download it from the cloud again”. When I’ve explained it’s no longer in the cloud or anywhere else I get told “that’s not possible”. No point wasting any more time there, I need to fix it myself.

So if you convert playlists to Apple Music , even if they do match correctly, they use Apple music song instances. That means that if i stop paying for Apple music all my music would go away. Once I’m through this disaster I definitely plan to stop paying for Apple music or cloud storage so this never happens again so that’s not an option.

It may be ethically wrong but it felt morally right to explore how to remove the DRM from Apple music tracks that I originally owned before Apple decided to delete them. There are tools out there that do that but in the end I was reluctant and most of our music no longer exists in the versions we bought in the 90s so both unethical and pointless.

Next step, we have an old Mac Mini we use for file storage and never launch iTunes on or have bothered upgrading from Sierra. That had all our music still sat in iTunes since it predated all the cloud syncing. We backed that up onto an external drive and I copied all the tracks into my Apple Music app. That then recognised it as music I own. I could then re-create the playlists using my own music and the text files Tim exported as templates. It’s a manual re-creation but it only takes 5 or 6 minutes per playlist and then I can export them as XML.

I have been watching my Mac upload my music into the Cloud since last night. Still going. I am concerned it’s going to “match” with the wrong versions again but at least my local instances are correct and I can deal with that. As soon as it’s all done I’m cancelling Apple Music and going back to syncing music over wifi with my Mac. The risk is too great that this could happen again.

I go to a lot of trouble to remove DRM off of books so I can back them up and own them. I pay for any content I have and clearly the risk with cloud “don’t worry about it , it just works” is that it doesn’t and if it goes wrong no-one has any clue how to fix it.

Oh and my facetime camera on my iPad is showing the green screen problem as soon as I start a call. Nothing wrong with the camera. This issue has been reported after iOS updates going back to 2013 with no fix. Apple’s response? “format it and reinstall”. I pointed out that would mean downloading over 4k books individually again I was told “that’s all we can recommend”.

Apple - it just works, except when it doesn’t.

10.09.19
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Apple iBooks - The Battle Contiunes

As some of you know I buy a lot of books. A LOT. I currently have over 4000 and I like them all downloaded on my phone and iPad, not “ready to download” but actually there. For years I have run into problems with iBooks which doesn’t seem designed to work with the combined models of lots of books that are then downloaded. The last few times I have bought or setup replacement devices (I smash screens a lot) the books wouldn’t download unless I selected each one manually. 4000 times.

This time setting up a new replacement I got a new fun error “this book cannot be downloaded as you don’t have enough storage”. Off to log a genius call I go…

Apple answer 1: Maybe you were out of storage? (Optimistic)

Me: Nope.  I have 170GB free

Apple answer 2: Did you backup your previous iPad? (Hopeful I’m an idiot)

Me: Yep, it’s all automatically done and in the cloud and it must be there because it knows what books need to be downloaded

Apple answer 3 (after more research).  Oh I see, it’s working as designed.  It only downloads new books you order not books you already have in the cloud. (Please don’t ask any more questions , just say thank you and go away)

Me: Really?  So it downloads all apps and all music but not all books

Apple:  Um, yes? (no that doesn’t sound right does it? damn)

Me: Interesting.  Can you send me a link to a page confirming that is the functionality

Apple.  Sure.  Let me find one. (She’s onto me, there’s no link)

Apple Answer 4 (after more research and a call back).  So I can’t find a link but that’s definitely how it works, it won’t download your existing books from the cloud (Sound forceful and confident and she’ll go away)

Me:  Except it did.  It downloaded a few hundred before stopping and then not doing any more for at least 2 hrs and now I can get it to work by individually selecting each book.  All 4000 of them.

Apple:  Ah, well it only downloads what you had backed up in the cloud as downloaded on your previous iPad (clutching at straws)

Me: So all of my books then. Because all of them were on my existing iPad

Apple: Oh. Well I will do more research. Are you OK in downloading each one by clicking on it for the remaining books or you could reset and re-setup the iPad and see if it works this time? .. The cloud was very busy yesterday with everyone downloading catalina (that last one at least made me laugh)

I did suggest it at least be escalated to the iBooks development team who could then review how their iCloud downloads are (not) working under load but since I’ve suggested this many times in the past I don’t hold out hope.

2200 done and counting… click click click click

08.23.19
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News for Ex Customers of Domino, Notes, Connections….

Here’s something I found out from HCL recently that I don’t think is widely known and is really good news for anyone who has let their licenses lapse. Previously if you chose not to renew IBM would require a penalty payment (usually equal to 2.5x what would have been your annual subscription) to re-establish your licenses. That meant once lapsed it became prohibitively expensive to start up again.

HCL does not want penalty payments. If you have let your licenses lapse you can re-activate them by paying the last subscription price you paid plus any % annual increases since then. Basically paying just the current annual renewal price even if you didn’t renew 3 year’s ago.

With the investment in the products HCL have already demonstrated and committed to (one major release a year for example) there are lots of good reasons to re-establish your maintenance. If you previously let your licensing lapse but still have Notes, Domino, Connections or Sametime , renewing your subscription gets you access to the latest versions and support so you can benefit from all the TCO and development enhancements already in v10 as well as what’s coming in v11 this year such as

  • the Nomad client for tablet and smartphone enabling you to access your existing Notes applications with no code changes,
  • the app dev pack enabling Node servers to access your Domino data and for web applications to be written using Angular , React or other frameworks accessing Domino data
  • S3 cloud storage for file attachments that can be shared across multiple servers delivering an even bigger saving in storage than DAOS does currently
  • A browser based lightweight Notes client that will support all your existing Notes apps with no additional development
  • Continual development of the web based Verse client for mail, calendar and sametime
  • A browser based low and pro code development environment
  • Sametime on mobile entitlement

Hopefully you’ve been hearing all the announcements coming out of HCL since early July In addition to many TCO features already in v10, we have heard what’s coming up for developers in v11 and the work already underway for v12. If you want to know more go here to find detailed presentations from the recent factory tour where HCL showed their current and future plans.

To get a renewal quote you can contact a Business Partner, or reach out to HCL directly

customersuccess@hcl.com

Or the sales directors for each region

EMEA Paul Mason (paul.mason@hcl.com)

North America Peter Phillips (peter.phillips@hcl.com)

APAC Sushovan Chatterjee (SushovanC@hcl.com)

08.13.19
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Onboarding With HCL

It’s now been several weeks since HCL took full ownership of what were the ICS (IBM Collaboration Solutions) products that include Domino, Sametime, Notes, Verse, Traveler, Portal and Connections. In those few weeks there’s been a lot of activity, not least transitioning over the development and support teams and setting up new systems for support, software access and community news.

You’ve probably seen many of the announcements or even attended the multiple webcasts but here are a few in case you missed them.

The new HCL division that holds responsiblity for these products is called Digital Solutions and their homepage for all HCL DS (not sure they use that abbreviation) activity is here https://www.cwpcollaboration.com. The blog you will want to follow is at https://www.cwpcollaboration.com/blogs.

So what does HCL Digital Solutions look like?

Along with the owernship of Notes/Domino, Sametime, Connections, LEAP (previously FEB), you can see all the planned integration points including Rest APIs, docker, Zoom, Salesforce and more. The Digital Solutions story is one that connects all their products together and understands the importance of other applications and services to the whole.


If you’re an existing customer you are going to want to register for both a customer account and a support account. Right now HCL don’t have single sign-on across their sites so you do need to register an account for each service. I’m not saying you “should” but you “could” use the same login and password everywhere.

To register as a customer go here

To register for support go here

To register for your software licenses and downloads (which HCL will have been given a record of by IBM) go here

HCL have also announced the first drop of the v11 beta which will be for Notes (Windows and Mac), Domino (Windows and Linux), Designer (Windows) and the embedded Sametime client. All of these in English language strings only on Sept 16th.

To register for the first beta drop you must sign up here by September 16th, after that date you will be added to the test group for the second beta drop https://registration.hclpartnerconnect.com/D11Beta

If you are interested in licensing, that has also transitioned to HCL entirely. Although I know of a few customers receiving letters from IBM, they are no longer entitled to sell your renewal or additional licenses. If you have any questions about licensing reach out to your Business Partner or visit the eCommerce portal online (you’ll need to register as a customer first) https://buy.hcltechsw.com

HCL have also committed to delivering v12 of the products in Q4 2020 so we are on schedule for one major release (and interim smaller releases) a year with v11 due in Q4 2019.

If the idea of upgrading all your clients it a bit overwhelming, don’t forget you have an entitlement to use Panagenda’s MarvelClient Essentials to upgrade from v9 at no charge. MarvelClient Essentials is built into Notes 10.0.1 and later but you can download it here if you need to get to that point.

So the question is, have you deployed v10 yet ?