Lotus Nut

Just a quick note that we are planning some Connections server maintenance the morning of September 24 (tomorrow).

In the meantime, feel free to read over this. :)

At his blog today, Ben Langhinrichs posted some concerns with the registration system at BleedYellow. I have replied at his blog but would also like other users of this site to see those answers as well.

Following is my reply at his site (his questions are italicized).

All, on the main www.bleedyellow.com website there is a link for you to click if you "Forgot your password".



1) Most web based systems that require a login to comment tell you so near the "Add a Comment" rather than simply leaving it inactive.  I clicked on "Add a Comment" on Scott Hook's blog and it didn't work, so I came to the erroneous conclusion that comments were blocked.  There should be a parenthetical (You must be logged in) or something like that.

1 - We have asked IBM since December, 2007 to allow unauthenticated comments for Lotus Connections. We're with you on this.

2) Many web based systems that require a login have a dual Register/Log In page.  When you go to log in with Connections (because I am fairly sure this part is generic Connections), there is no option to register.

2 - We have a "Register" link at the top of EVERY Lotus Connections page on the site. We want people to register and we want it to be simple to register. But we could look into adding a registration link on the login pages. (see 4 below)

3) When I went to register and it found my name, there was no option to simply log in with it.  This is less common, but very useful.

3 - We request that you use your email address. It's how pretty much all websites these days work (like Facebook, LinkedIn), so that's what we figure is the best way to do this.

4) This is the most annoying issue.  When you attempt to log in, and your password doesn't work, there should be some indication about how to either retrieve or reset your password.

4 - Thank you for the suggestion. That would require modifications to some Lotus Connections js files that we haven't done.

5) Finally, when I go back to the BleedYellow confirmation, and follow the original link, instead of a link directly to my profile, there is a long to a search place from which I can search for my profile.  Why?  You know my profile name, so why would you want me to search for it again?

5 - Not sure I'm following you - I believe the older registration emails took you to where you are supposed to login to "My Profile". The registration system had some changes in the past and it doesn't do that any longer.

6) Back to the confirmation letter, which has the line "You MUST login with the e-mail address that you provided at registration." which seems to contradict the registration page, which clearly says "Your username will be composed of your First Name + Middle Initial (if entered) + Last name."  The first seems to indicate I should use my email address as my username, but the second that I should use "Ben Langhinrichs"

6 - The registration page states that "You will login with this email address." All of these changes were in prior to Lotusphere 2009.

We don't check for duplicate email addresses at this point. I believe the registration probably went through but now the system is confused because there are two accounts with the same email address. We will take this into consideration. Feel free to post a request at http://wisdom.bleedyellow.com.

Tomorrow evening (Wednesday, June 24, 2009) we will have some downtime on almost all of the BleedYellow servers. This includes the Connections and Sametime servers. It's a planned, routine maintenance outage to load some fixes, etc...

Thanks!

As many of you may know, we have had a problem with Dogear here for a while. At one point, I started referring to it as Old Yeller (could not resist the dead dog/yellow reference - sorry). After doing a lot of upgrades (to IHS/WAS/Connections), DB troubleshooting, completely deleting the DB (which has since been restored), enabling advanced Windows logging (which did not help much), even moving to a fresh VM with a clean install of WAS, maintenance, etc..., nothing seemed to work. In all the crashes of the Dogear jvm, only once did a good Dr. Watson dump get sent out. But in one of them we noticed what looked like a strange search of the Dogear database. After further digging, I looked at this closer with IBM. Turns out we were seeing a lot of these in the IHS access.log:


It was not always the same search - it would be for different users, etc.... The IP address, though, is a Googlebot. So, in walks robots.txt to see if he can help! After adding it to the server, I wondered how long it would take for Google to honor the settings as we kept seeing the crashes. As part of the move to a new box with Deployment Manager, the Dogear jvm would automagically restart. So that helped uptime a bit. ;) I noticed that the last crawl of Dogear by Google was around 8:25 PM on 6/12/09. And at 8:29 PM Dogear was last restarted. So it appears that Google took around 12 hours to start honoring the robots.txt.

After running now for almost a week, I think we are confident in saying that Dogear has issues with this type of string in the crawl. After some further data crunching from 6/12/09 (where we logged 7 Dogear crashes between 7:11 pm and 8:30 pm), here are some quick stats on when we saw Dogear get crawled with this string in the IHS access.log and when the server recovery message was logged in the WAS SystemOut.log:

the string "lang=en?ref=sex%" was found in IHS access.log
6/12 19:07
6/12 19:12
6/12 19:25
6/12 19:43
6/12 19:50, 19:52
6/12 20:06
6/12 20:25


Restarts in SystemOut.log
6/12 19:11
6/12 19:15
6/12 19:29
6/12 19:44
6/12 19:57
6/12 20:11
6/12 20:29

Since those times on 6/12, the crawl has not occurred any more and Dogear has not crashed. Here's to hoping this is finally resolved!

To all of our wonderful bloggers here, you are probably aware of the issues we have been working through with Dogear. This has the potential to make your blog appear unresponsive when Dogear hangs before automagically restarting itself. Before it would just die, now it restarts. If you have the "Dogear Bookmarks" available in your blog template, then this is what causes your blog to take a while to load sometimes. If this gets too irritating for you, you can modify your template to simply disable the Dogear integration (at least temporarily until we get this sorted out).

Thanks!

Let's consider that for some reason your Connections server went down due to, say, a major power outage. Everything comes up ok except for Blogs (it could be another service as well, though) and you are getting the following error message:



When I was thinking about why this could be happening, I thought that either (a) there was a key file that was open but got corrupted, or (b) hopefully I just need to clear the Blogs cache directory because of corruption there. To make a long story short, it appears to have been a problem with the cache (whew...)!

The cache for a WAS server application is here:

[WAS_ROOT}\profiles\{Profile}\temp\{Node}\{application}

In this case it was:

C:\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\myprofile\temp\mynode\BlogsServer

Basically, I shut down the server process, moved all of the files in the BlogsServer folder over to another location on the disk, and then started the server to let it create the temp files again. Thankfully, everything came back up alright. Oddly, the Homepage was rendering the blogs widget just fine - it was just the direct URL that wasn't working.

After seeing the security problems with Sametime Connect Client API that Carl Tyler blogged about over the weekend, Lotus 911 has decided to disable plug-in installation for the im.bleedyellow.com Sametime Community. Hopefully, this will be a temporary change until IBM releases a fix for this.

If you experience any issues with this, please post a comment here or use the "Contact" link at the top of the page.

IBM has been putting a lot of hard work into Lotus Connections 2.5, that should be released in 3Q09. Luis Benitez has an excellent post on what is new in Connections 2.5. Thanks Luis for the great information.

Some of the things I am specifically excited about are the wikis, more widgets, homepage (a lot more "Facebookish" in what can be shown on the top updates), profiles (allowing status updates like Facebook/Twitter/Squawk), extended BlackBerry support (go here to get the current BlackBerry client), iPhone/Mobile browser support, etc... Check out Luis' blog above for all of the great details.

In order to patch the guest and host servers with the newest critical Windows patch, we will have some brief downtime for all of the BleedYellow components tonight (that also includes Sametime...) This will occur sometime around 9PM Eastern.

Thanks!

I would like to introduce you all to David Brown (that guy who sits beside me at work!) and his new blog Port 1352.

Or "Here are some new features provided by Lotus Connections 2.0"... I think it's pretty awesome that there are 173 blogs hosted here - though most of you need to post a little more frequently!! But for those of you who stay on top of blogging, Connections 2.0 has a lot of nice updates to the Blogs service. The lists below are not exhaustive, but represent many of the new features.

Blogs Home - this feature has been significantly enhanced with extra views and a cleaner presentation of the data.

• Defaults to the most recent entries, but you can sort with various criteria - title, recommendations, comments, visits.
• Display summary (just title) or detail (first ~250 characters of body).
• On the left, you can also browse to All Blogs and My Recommendations.
• Blog Subscriptions - hover over these to either subscribe to Entries or Comments in your browser or by adding them to a Community.
• On the right are links to Featured Blog Entries, Most Recommended, Most Commented, and Most Visited.

Blog Authoring

• If you are a member of a multi-authored blog, you may choose which blog to post to more easily.
• Going into html editing mode, you may embed content from online services, such as YouTube.
• Preview the post before publishing it.
• Embedding images is now much simpler with a "wizard" instead of just entering a URL (to your own upload directory, usually). This will allow you upload directly from your computer, recent photos, or a URL. You may also choose the layout and size of the image and make the settings default. To me, this is very reminiscent of the Blogger upload functionality.

Commenting

• Comments are now in ascending order (like all good blogs should be)! This was one of the biggest complaints from the community and one of the first "issues" we noticed when setting up the site back in December.
• Much-improved comment previewing system. This was also a big complaint because you would have to go "back" in the browser in order to modify what you were previewing. Now, it is all inline.
• Have you ever wanted to cross-post a comment to your own blog? This is now possible using the "Add this comment to my own blog" option!

Etc...

• At the bottom of each blog post is a "Notify Others" option which allows you to select other registered BleedYellow users to send a link to the post you're currently viewing.
• Also at the bottom of each post is a "Flag as inappropriate"
• PlanetLotus "support". There were some formatting issues that prevented direct Connections 1.0.2 feeds from being used at PlanetLotus (you could use FeedBurner, though, which is probably a better idea - allowing you to track subscribers). This has been corrected with Connections 2.0. For the feed you submit to PlanetLotus, you need to use the following format: http://www.bleedyellow.com/blogs/roller-ui/rendering/feed/lotusnut/entries/rss (the default link is "/atom" at the end - Yancy Lent has found that /rss will work with the PlanetLotus feed system!! Thanks Yancy!
  

Funny story - after compiling this list I decided to see if there is a similar list in the InfoCenter, and there is. I believe I actually caught everything except for the AutoSave feature (which I have set for 3 minutes).

During the evening of Saturday, August 9, 2008 we will have some scheduled downtime for maintenance of all BleedYellow services.

 

Also, Sametime shouldn't be down for very long.

 

Thank you for your patience...

 

Cross-posted at BleedYellow Site Feedback

Over the past couple of weeks, I have had some people email/tweet me about connectivity to im.bleedyellow.com. In these cases, port 1533 was being blocked either at a client location or a public place (even in a hospital!). So the first thing I always mention is to try port 80 and voilà we're in business!

So while we are all thinking about it - change those connections on your laptops! :)

We want to have everyone participating in the im.bleedyellow.com Sametime community. So after many internal discussions about how to prove this, we've released this Official Statement that we have not, do not, and will not be logging chats that occur on this Sametime community.

We've started a new shared blog: BleedYellow Site Feedback. Make sure that you subscribe to it to receive announcements on site updates, maintenance, downtime, etc... as well as some general posts to respond to questions that people may have.

The first post is about some scheduled downtime Saturday evening.