Watch out for quotes!

by with No Comment Misc

Just a reminder to be watchful of non-standard characters in IBM Connections user names, and also to thoroughly review your IBM Connections TDI logs on a regular basis.  This is a current APAR (IBM ID required):

[titled_box title = “IBM APAR LO81076”]LO81076: USERS WHO ARE REGISTED WITH QUOTATION MARKS IN THEIR NAMES CANNOT USE CONNECTIONS PROPERLY
APAR status 
OPEN
Error description
Users who are registered using identifiers that are in quotation marks (Jennifer “Jen” Doe) cannot use most of the functions of profiles.

Internet Explorer displays many errors after the user logs in and the Profiles home page is displayed. Firefox simply doesn’t show certain features such as the search entry box[/titled_box]

I’m sure that this particular APAR will get resolved in an upcoming fix for Connections 4.5 (I’m not sure if 5.0 is similarly afflicted?), however these types of issue do crop up every so often, so be ready for them!

VMWare Logo Black

One for the VMWare admins…

by with 2 Comments Misc

VMWare Logo Black

A quick lesson I’ve learnt this week.

If using VMWare ESXi 5.5 (the most recent release), then make sure you update your VMs (or create new VMs) to use the VMXNET 3 adapter rather than the aged E1000 adapter.

The reason?

An ESXi 5.x host with virtual machines using an E1000 or E1000e virtual adapter fails with a purple diagnostic screen.

The article suggests this may happen with VMWare ESXi 5.0 and 5.1 as well, but I’ve never seen it on those releases.  After replacing the adapters with VMXNET 3 ones and reconfiguring the networking on the VMs we’ve had no crashes since.

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Using recent versions of Firefox with iNotes 8.5.3 and 9.0

by with No Comment Misc

This issue has recently come up with a customer that uses our SocialCloud Messaging solution (that’s cloud-based iNotes in simple terms)…

Updates made to Firefox, starting in Firefox 15, result in iNotes no longer working as expected. Firefox has removed support for signed scripts, and several iNotes features use signed scripts. Because signed scripts no longer execute, several features in iNotes that use signed scripts no longer work.

– URLs in text are not automatically converted into hotlinks in a message when mail, calendar events, or to do’s are sent or saved

– The failure of the URL conversion to complete results in the Send and Save action buttons in Mail, Calendar events, or To Do’s not working. None of these documents can be sent or saved.

– Attachments cannot be added to mail messages

Users were unable to send mail in iNotes using Firefox 24 in our case, when Chrome, IE and Safari were working fine.

The solution?

Enter the following server console commands:

set config iNotes_WA_FirefoxSignedScript

restart task http

This disables the use of SignedScripts when using Firefox and thus enables the older DHTML user interface for certain operations.  Problem solved!