Heading to IamLUG? Still Time to Join an Outstanding Group of Individuals Attending

Bill Malchisky  April 30 2013 01:00:00 PM

This year, Linux School: Advanced Administration for IBM Software debuts at IamLUG. This offering, covers a lot of useful tools and installation tips for IBM products on Linux. We'll cover a lot of information and am looking forward to showcasing useful utilities which can save you time when troubleshooting. There is still time to get there, find decently priced air fare, and join a great group of peers to learn. Have you signed-up yet?

Here is the official list of IamLUG Sessions and speakers

My official abstract is below:

We've covered the basics before, now let's deep dive and get to the advanced items. We'll quickly review partition approaches, then demo many command line tools and skills that can help save you time with your Linux installation and maintenance tasks -- customized for IBM/Lotus software. Tips, knowledge, techniques, and as much information as I can provide in an hour. This is a brand new session offered only to the IBM/Lotus community. I am thrilled to debut it at IamLUG. Get ahead of the crowd and join us in St. Louis!


I am really looking forward to this session and hope you can make it. Chris Miller arranged quite a group of speakers and I am thrilled to once again be presenting at this fantastic event.

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Running Adobe Acrobat Reader on Ubuntu x64

Bill Malchisky  April 10 2013 01:00:00 AM

Adobe Acrobat Reader is i386 code that needs one i386 library file --- when installed on an x64 OS --- omitted with the native x64 installation of Ubuntu 12.x. As such, you'll see this error.



To fix the issue, run this command



From here you'll see this window, which will flow into several screens of files being unpacked and then installed. It's quite a lot. When finished though, Acrobat will run.



The process continues with suggested packages and alerting the end-user to what new packages will also be included.



Tip -- if you try to run a program from the GUI and it fails to start, the most efficient way to grasp the underlying problem is to run the program from within a terminal window--as illustrated in the first image. This way, when the program fails, you can immediately see the reason, then begin the process to find a solution. Example, for Acrobat Reader, the program just stopped running inside the GUI, but running $acroread provided the error pictured. From there, the solution is much easier to derive.

• Comments [3]

IBM Connections 4.5: Decoding the Downloaded Filenames

Bill Malchisky  April 1 2013 03:00:00 AM

As IBM announced IBM Connections 4.5 on 12 March 2013 with a 29 March download availability, there became a lot of interest from partners and customers to dive-in and take advantage of the great new enhancements this product provides. To that point and as this collaborative tool does a lot, there are a significant quantity of files from which you can choose. Now, not every customer site will need all of the files available in Passport Advantage for this offering, but the more you need, the more complex it can be to understand what you actually have. "Why is that?" you might ask. The non-ICS files suffer from an advanced case of terse encoding. Thus, unless you are a seasoned pro with DB2, WAS, TDI, Cognos, and FileNet, you might not have any clue what these files represent. But, the dlmgr.pro provided with Download Director output makes it easier. For 30 files though, constantly referring to it can be quite inefficient, hence my motivation to create the file list below; perhaps the listing will save you some time. Additionally, at the bottom, I attached the text file version for easy reference.

To his credit, four years ago today Ed Brill did a great job with fixing the Lotus package names starting in Notes Domino version 8.5. This enhancement expanded within Lotus to our benefit. As you'll also see below, ICS provided excellent filenames for the three Connections 4.5 files. Other product managers seemed to listen with Cognos and DB2 for example, as they avoided the product numbers as the sole characters in the filename, but the introduced conventions are so compressed and non-standardized that you still need to take time to rename each file so you and your team members have an idea of what you really downloaded. Curious when the Tivoli and WebSphere teams will be able to assist and follow Ed's lead. If possible, I would also like to see more standardized (meaning leading with the product name, and version like ICS does) and more detailed names for the Cognos, FileNet, and DB2 packages too.

For lucidity, I am neither complaining nor implying as such, just politely illustrating an opportunity for improvement across another quality product set within the IBM software family.

Enjoy learning IBM Connections 4.5!
======================================================

What The File Prefix Abbreviations Mean In IBM Connections 4.5
---------------------------------------------------------------------
bi_qsg - IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Quick Start Guide
bimodel - IBM Cognos Framework Manager
bippes - IBM Cognos Business Intelligence PowerPlay Server
bippclient - IBM Cognos Business Intelligence PowerPlay Client
bisamples - IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Samples
bisrvr - IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server
bitrsfrmr - IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Transformer
cmmsrvr - IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Metric Server
coc_win32 - IBM Cognos for Microsoft Office
crn_qsg - IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Reporting Quick Start Guide
crnsrvr - IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Reporting
DB2_DSclient - IBM Data Server Client
DB2_ESE - IBM DB2 Enterprise Server Edition
DB2_RTC - IBM Data Server Runtime Client
DB2_SF_SSL - IBM DB2 Support Files for SSL Functionality
dm - IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Data Manager
docmmqsg - IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Metric Manager Quick Start Guide
dqa - IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Dynamic Query Analyzer
edge.repo.8000.all - IBM Edge Components: Load Balancer for IPV4 and IPV6 (for WAS Network Deployment v8.0 Multiplatform)
FN_COL - IBM FileNet Collaboration Services
FN_CPE - IBM FileNet Content Platform Engine
FN_CPEC - IBM FileNet Content Platform Engine Client
lp_mp_win32 - IBM Cognos Supplementary Languages Documentation
pp_qsg - IBM Cognos Business Intelligence PowerPlay Quick Start Guide
realmon - IBM Cognos Real-time Monitoring
stats - IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Statistics
upgrademanager - IBM Cognos Lifecycle Manager
vvm - IBM Cognos Virtual View Manager

Unnamed Files
--------------
CZ9MMML - tivoli.directory.integrator.identity.edition.v7.1.for.linux.i386.CZ9MMML.tar
CZ9MNML - tivoli.directory.integrator.identity.edition.v7.1.for.linux.x64.CZ9MNML.tar
CZ9MJML - Tivoli Directory Integrator Identity Edition v7.1 for Windows x86
CZ9MKML - Tivoli Directory Integrator Identity Edition v7.1 for Windows x86-64
CZ9MLML - Tivoli Directory Integrator Identity Edition v7.1 for AIX
CZ9MPML - Tivoli Directory Integrator Identity Edition v7.1 for Linux zSeries & s/390
CZM9KML - was.v8.network.deployment.1of4.multiplatform.CZM9KML.zip
CZM9LML - was.v8.network.deployment.2of4.multiplatform.CZM9LML.zip
CZM9MML - was.v8.network.deployment.3of4.multiplatform.CZM9MML.zip
CZVG4ML - was.v8.network.deployment.4of4.multiplatform.CZVG4ML.zip
CZM91ML - was.v8.supplements.file.1of4.multiplatform.CZM91ML.zip
CZM94ML - was.v8.supplements.file.2of4.multiplatform.CZM94ML.zip
CZM95ML - was.v8.supplements.file.3of4.multiplatform.CZM95ML.zip
CZXR9ML - was.v8.supplements.file.4of4.multiplatform.CZXR9ML.zip

Decoded Files
----------------
Connections_4.5_Quick_Start_Guide.pdf
IBM_Connection_4.5_wizards - Consistent across each flavor
IBM_Connections_4.5 - Consistent across each flavor

-=-=-=-=-=End of File=-=-=-=-=-
cn4.5.abbbreviations.key.readme

Three Useful Links
IBM Connections 4.5 Support Portal
IBM Connections 4.5 System Requirements
IBM Connections Product Page

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Some Fun at BLUG

Bill Malchisky  March 28 2013 01:03:21 AM

Our illustrious BLUG organizer Theo Heselmans had a surprise for us. During a special event for the speakers and sponsors, he arranged for a Dutch artist to arrive and sketch caricatures for anyone invited. As I recall, there were 31 completed in about three hours (plus time for a couple of breaks). So the artist named, Thijs, worked tirelessly creating art. He had two LCD monitors setup, the second was facing the victim volunteer, so we each could see the picture evolve. I believe that Tice used a version of Corel Draw to create his art, quite quickly as well. Great guy too, who enjoyed hanging out with us for a pint at the end of the night and breakfast in the morning before his drive back home. Below is his handy artwork for me--he even captured my sport coat; though not the greatest picture with my camera, the artwork is fine.

Thanks, once again to Theo for a great event.

UPDATE 31 March 2013 -- Theo just release the full listing of all the artwork created that evening, available here.

Cheers!

 

• Comments [1]

Train Tips for European Traveling

Bill Malchisky  March 27 2013 02:00:00 AM

Train travel is fun and certainly exciting. You can easily get to anywhere with enhancements to the multi-country rail network in Europe. Here are a several tips (hardly plenary, I'll add) to aid you on your way.

1. Rail travel is expensive on mainland Europe (UK is quite reasonable comparatively); with the advent of cheap (for some travel situations) airfare like Easy Jet, but if you have luggage you need to move around, rail can be by far the easiest and most cost effective way around Europe (e.g. with two checked bags and two carry-on bags, my US$83 Easy Jet ticket ballooned to US$931; suddenly, the 'high-priced' rail ticket was US$700 cheaper; so ALWAYS read the fine print on discount airlines' agreements before purchasing);

N.B. Some of the individual high-speed lines have special offers, like DB ICE (see below), but are not offered on the European rail wholesaler sites; so, if you are creative, you may be able to piece together a trip to meet your needs and save some cash in the process or find a deal for precisely where you want to go.

2. Swiss trains are simple, no-frills, but are impeccably on-time; so if you want to catch your target train, you must be ready before it arrives. No power at the seats and no WiFi -- Switzerland is a small country after all, so this reminded me of the NYC commuter trains -- in terms of time and services;

3. The prestigious French TGV, is fast--nothing else. If you are in second class, you don't exist; the trains are tired, worn-out, quite filthy overall (the amount of dust on top of litter under the seats and along the insides should never be seen on any train--especially at their prices); you only get power in first class (double the cost), there is no WiFi on-board and the few tables that do exist in second class, tease you with one power outlet per side -- which didn't work in the three cars that I tried. Also, when your final destination is a city other than Paris and you are traveling through, you will need to change train stations in most cases;

If you take their subway called the RER, know that you will be quite challenged to get through the gates with your bags, not all exits have elevators or escalators and the turnstiles are very narrow. I only saw one baggage assist window in Gare de Lyon, to push my garment bag through the window, but (Gare de) Paris Nord lacked any of these. People may offer to help while you juggle your luggage, but if someone takes your bag from them while you are engaging in creative yoga moves with your laptop bag or shopping bags, will they stop that person? Too much risk for me. Your mileage will vary here.

If you have to change stations and have luggage, take a taxi -- hardly cheap, but much easier. As your larger/wider pull bags may physically be unable to fit through the turnstile and you could miss your connection while trying. In New York, they have active handicapped doors at almost all of the Manhattan and larger outer borough subway station turnstiles, allowing for an easy entrance/exit to/from each subway station; quite surprised that Paris lacked this capability in 2013.

4. The Thayls from Paris (for example) to Brussels and The Netherlands offers more comfortable seats and enhanced decor over the French and Swiss trains, but are more cramped for seating. You will have power at each seat, one receptacle per passenger, but do not count on the WiFi. As a Parisian gentleman confided, "[WiFi] never works on this train, as I take it regularly. If you get a connection, you will finish replicating when you arrive in Brussels." Also, you can only get WiFi access in second class with the more expensive "semi-flex" fare. WiFi codes are unique and printed on your ticket -- except if you purchase your ticket in Switzerland, where their train ticket machines are disconnected from the Thayls computer network and no matter how much you pay, you won't get a proper code. The Swiss ticket agent will not tell you this (perhaps as they don't know), so avoid an unpleasant surprise. Save your money here;

5. If traveling from Brussels to one of the suburbs like Leuven, ensure that you get the IC trains (express) rather than the IR trains (local); the time difference is quite dramatic; also know that if you lack a Belgian bank card, then you are considered international and will be unable to purchase your tickets via the ticketing machines, necessitating you to make a cash only transaction on the train for EU3 more. I would also check the machine first, to get an idea of the fare and ensure that the conductor charges you the correct amount, plus the EU3 more. I would also check the machine first, to get an idea of the fare and ensure that the conductor charges you the correct amount, plus the EU3 penalty, or you can easily get overcharged;

6. The Netherlands --- like most countries --- offers comfortable regional trains, to complement their high-speed cousins; overall, they are slower than the high-speed Thayls but are comfortable and lack WiFi; as The Netherlands is also a small country, their trains will lack some additional features, but this is balanced by their offering lots of trains throughout the Benelux region; those that are heading to BLUG 2014 in Breda, NL, can take note;

7. The German Deutsche Bahn (DB Bahn)'s ICE offers limited WiFi service, but only on select domestic runs. If you are traveling through Germany to another destination, expect to not have WiFi access; though their website indicated they are looking to improve WiFi coverage, no additional details were available at the time of this writing;

Note: Train Deals -- Deutsche Bahn offers a London -> Germany [Cologne,Frankfurt,Hanover] special for EU59 http://www.bahn.com/i/view/GBR/en/prices/europe/london-spezial.shtml
or offers to other Central European cities for just EU39 -> http://www.bahn.com/i/view/GBR/en/prices/europe/europa-spezial.shtml

8. Though the USA is not known throughout the world for its prevalence of high-speed rail, the Amtrak Acela rail service in the northeast is phenomenal overall, completely eclipsing the French TGV, IMHO. Acela offers WiFi in all cars, multiple power receptacles at every seat, clean comfortable cars with plenty of legroom, well maintained cars despite years of heavy usage by travelers, and it is fast -- not as fast as the TGV, but I'll forgo some speed to dramatically improve my productivity when traveling. Also note, that on routes from NYC to BOS or WAS (DC), Amtrak's Acela moves about double the passengers of all the airlines combined -- their service is that good. {Source: fact provided during Rail Day 2012, GCT, NYC}

N.B., Amtrak also offers WiFi on most regional trains in the Northeast corridor as well; their website's booking section puts a Wireless signal icon next to each train that offers their free WiFi service.

Rail Sites of Interest
Eurail.com http://www.eurail.com/trains-europe/high-speed-trains
Raileurope.com http://www.raileurope.com
DB Bahn http://www.bahn.com
Thayls http://www.thalys.com/be/en/
Swiss Railways http://www.swissrailways.com
TGV http://www.tgv.com/en
BritRail http://www.britrail.com
Eurostar http://www.eurostar.com/
Heathrow Express https://www.heathrowexpress.com/

UPDATE -- "The Man In Seat 61" -- http://www.seat61.com/ -- Thanks, Mike Smith, for the suggestion.

Hope this helps and saves you some time when traveling overseas. Have fun and "All aboard!"

• Comments [3]

BLUG Slides Uploaded

Bill Malchisky  March 26 2013 02:00:00 AM

After a fabulous event in Leuven, Belgium with BLUG 2013, I adjusted the deck to account for a few new morsels provided by IBM since the release of IBM Domino 9 (link in yesterday's post). I also provided the changes to the BLUG Team to ensure currency and consistency across versions. The slides are located in My Presentations section.

Title: The Ultimate IBM and Lotus on Linux Workshop for Windows Admins
Session ID: A13
Track: Administration

Absolutely enjoyed the event and to be part of what is now the largest LUG by attendee count at 325 attendees (confirmed by IBM during the CGS). Congratulations to Theo and his team for a fantastic LUG.

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A Few Quick Points on Domino 9, x64, and Linux

Bill Malchisky  March 25 2013 02:00:00 AM

IBM released Notes Domino 9 this week and it has been a firestorm of zeal, anticipation realized, fun tweets, community upgrades, and success stories overall. Included in the server code are two x86 Linux installation flavors for the first time. This allows one to run native Domino code in either i386 or x64 mode.

If you attended Linuxfest at IBM Connect 2013 with myself, Wes Morgan and Daniel Nashed, my BLUG 2013 session, or my private Domino training sessions since December, you were ahead of the curve.

Regardless, here are a few quick points to help ensure things go smoothly with using Domino 9 on Linux.
1. It is absolutely imperative that you install the correct code with the correct OS; thus, if you have an i386 OS, you must install the corresponding i386 code, or you'll get unhelpful errors; the same is true for the respective x64 combination
2. When you unpack the tarball, you'll notice that IBM --- to their credit --- created a new directory to help keep the code straight: "linux64"; all of the x64 Domino code will extract under this subdirectory now
3. Due to the inclusion of the new Ubuntu MultiArch design enhancements matured in version 12.04 LTS, Domino 9 will install onto an Ubuntu server. Know that if you want support from IBM, you still need to use Red Hat (RHEL) or SUSE (SLES)
4. You must upgrade your existing Domino Linux servers to RHEL 6, as RHEL 5 is no longer supported with the release of Domino 9

Notations
a. Upgrading is easy with my long-standing partition tip to ALWAYS put /opt and /local in separate file systems before installing Domino; if you did that, upgrading the OS is quite trivial
b. If you haven't, take the time now to partition these directories with your RHEL 6 upgrade/installation
c. I recommend using multiple partitions even with a VM installation

5.  Ensure SELinux is disabled; if you installed the graphics, then XGL as well
6. Additional tips can be found in the "Lotus Application Introduction" section of my BLUG 2013 slide deck located here
7. IBM Notes and Domino 9 Operating System Requirements, patch levels, and support notations technote is located here

Enjoy and happy computing!

• Comments [0]

IBM Connect Slides Uploaded

Bill Malchisky  February 5 2013 06:07:43 PM

I took some time today to update My Presentations page and insert the latest (updated) slides from my IBM Connect 2013 session.

Title: Infrastructure Fitness and Design Simplicity for IBM Mobile Connect
Session ID: BP406
Track: Best Practices

Really enjoyed speaking once again with the Lotusphere/Connect team and working with René Winkelmeyer as well. Happy reading and enjoy the slides. Let me know if you have any questions or comments. Great to meet so many people at IC13 this year too.

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New Upgrade Tool in Fedora 18

Bill Malchisky  January 18 2013 06:00:00 AM

Fedora 18 comes with a new upgrade tool entitled, FedUp. It allows you to perform system upgrades. You can also install it on Fedora 17 so that you can load the RPM there and then utilize the tool to get to version 18. This is a command line tool (CLI), which will download several to a lot of packages (depending upon your configuration), a new kernel, initrd, the will reboot the box to perform the final operations. Know that the code is new and may very well change before Fedora 18 is released.

From their wiki, they offer a notation:

Security Considerations
"FedUp does not yet ensure that only trusted software from Fedora is run on your system when you are doing upgrade over the network. Refer to Bugzilla: #877623 for more details. You can download the ISO release image and verify the authenticity independently before performing a upgrade with Fedup via media or ISO images methods to workaround this issue. Note that neither Anaconda not Preupgrade verified the authenticity of the source either and this is not a regression."

Of course, with any new software tool, there are some issues. Here are a few experiences. Test it as you may be unaffected, but it looks to be a nice way to move forward and easily upgrade your versions with future releases.
Unsatisfactory Experience here, another user reported that their HDDs weren't detected, but if you have a freeze after upgrading from Fedora 17 to 18, here is a fix as Red Hat support reported it's not a bug.

For more information on Fedora 18 and FedUp, try these two links
Release Notes
FedUp Wiki
Fedora Project Wiki

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A Difficult Change of Plans Regarding SkiLUG

Bill Malchisky  January 16 2013 09:00:00 PM

This is the blog entry I never thought I would have to write. With apologies, SkiLUG 2013 is cancelled for this year.

My team and I started planning SkiLUG 2013 during Lotusphere 2012 and garnered a lot of interest in what we were planning for the community. People from multiple time zones were excited. From that basis, we started immediately with finding a location and proceeding with all of the action items that one does when planning such an event. Things were going along well, until... Hurricane Sandy decimated the southern most part of my town and the New York City metro-area as a whole. A week later winter storm Athena hit the same area. Several local business that were interested in co-sponsoring our event were hit hard. Then the fiscal cliff issue started and some companies needed to pause on early Q1 expenditures until their new January financial picture revealed itself. The financial risk became too great. My mother taught me a sound lesson when I was young -- never engage in business matters on assumed income. I've seen too many people, projects, and companies get hurt over the years by not following this advice.

In the end, out of ethics, I am unable to provide an offering to the community that would otherwise disrespect your investment of time and resources. I feel that you must get something out of your time away from the office to warrant your commitment. I have such a great admiration for the IBM/Lotus community and want to have those relationships remain in good standing. At this point, my team unanimously decided that we need to pause this year's event. We will revisit this and plan something soon. Thank you to all the attendees for showing interest as well. I appreciate your understanding, as we are all quite disappointed, but know it is the correct decision.

• Comments [2]