Lotus Nut

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!

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.

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.

RIM has now made it easy to access Profiles and Dogear Lotus Connection services from a BlackBerry.

If you would like to download this directly from your BlackBerry, please visit this page: http://www.bleedyellow.com/bbconn/For_4.2.1/Connections.jad or http://www.bleedyellow.com/bbconn/For_4.6.0/Connections.jad

This is only available for BB OS 4.2.1 and greater. Once you download the application and launch it, you will be prompted to enter your username (email address) and password. Below the password field is a Server button. Click this and just enter https://www.bleedyellow.com. Save that value and then login!

Accessing Profiles and Dogear are actually fairly good starting points for this application. It will be great to access profile information (click-to-call Yellowbleeders...) and we all know that BlackBerry bookmarks don't get saved or restored, so just use Dogear!

For further information about the product, start here: http://na.blackberry.com/eng/services/server/domino/connections.jsphttp://na.blackberry.com/eng/services/server/domino/connections.jsp

Further documentation is available from the links below:

BlackBerry Client for IBM Lotus Connections Version 1.0 - Release Notes
BlackBerry Client for IBM Lotus Connections Version 1.0 - Technical Note for Administrators
BlackBerry Client for IBM Lotus Connections Version 1.0 - User Guide (trackball devices)
BlackBerry Client for IBM Lotus Connections Version 1.0 - User Guide (trackwheel devices)

If you're like me, then you probably just hid that pesky little Activities sidebar panel in your Notes client. Let me remind you that it's there and that you can add the BleedYellow server. Just go back into your Notes Preferences and for the server use: http://www.bleedyellow.com/activities

Then you can drag and drop content to your (yellow) heart's content!

It appears that there is some type of formatting issue with the native RSS feeds for Lotus Connections servers (not just BleedYellow) and the parser used at PlanetLotus.org. If you wish to get your feed over there, allow me to recommend that you go to FeedBurner and setup a feed there. Then just get that feed over to Yancy via the blog submission page at PlanetLotus.org. This will at least let you showing up there!!