Also this year, Theo Heselmans made me the honor of accepting my submission 🙂
I will be speaking with my dear friend Marianna Tomasatti, another Italian HCL Business Partner.
Our session is: Ad01. Useful hacks for Domino Administrators
It will be Wednesday, April 26 from 13:30 to 14:30 in room C. – Husly Lounge
You can find all the awesome sessions of Engage 2023 here
It will be a pleasure for me to speak again at this great event. Engage is the new Lotusphere! And it will be great to meet again many friends from all over the world.
After digging a bit into the issue I reported in my previous post, I found out that this is not a bug of Sametime. The problem lies in my customer network topology. As in many other customers I work with, they have some servers on the intranet, and some others on the internet, in this specific case the Domino server that is the LDAP server is on an internal domain ( .lan ) while the Sametime server is on a public domain ( .it ).
This is not a problem for Sametime, all you need to do is use some “extra_host” settings in docker-compose.yml and it works
The problem is that the URL generated by Verse when people upload their pictures is https:// pointing to the Domino server and the Sametime proxy does not like self signed certificates. In fact if I manually change it to use http:// rather than https:// in the person document, then the user picture is displayed correctly
I do not believe I can have the Verse development team change the way they generate the URL and use http:// so with this kind of network topology I have to find a workaround, else the problem will remain.
Thanks to my friend Erik Schwalb from HCL, who got in touch with me and told me that in his setup, where all the servers are in public domains using proper certificates this works fine.
With the customer where I installed Sametime 12 we had an issue with Meetings using an Android device. From a Android phone a user could not join a meeting or create a new one. With iOS devices, this problem did not happen. We tested on Sametime 12.0.FP1 and Sametime 12.0.1
We opened a Case and in the end HCL Support found the solution, you have to add to the file .env this line
I have installed Sametime 12.0.1 integrated with Verse. The users now upload their pictures from the Verse UI but this breaks the display of images in Sametime.
Business card photos must meet the following requirements: Photos must be less than 45K in size. Photos 10K or less are recommended. Photo file types .jpg and .gif are supported. Photos to be used in business card for mobile or web clients they must be in the format of a URL, such as hosted from a web server or HCL Connections Profiles server.
So the users for which I manually define the Photo URL field everything works fine
But for users who upload the picture from Verse the Photo URL is something like this
This type of URL cannot be read correctly by Sametime as an image and the result is that user’s picture are not displayed in Sametime, both in the clients and in the meetings
The only workaround I can think of is to disable the possibility for the users to change the image from Verse and use a proper URL that points to a web server ( I use the same Domino server that does LDAP ). This will cause probably some dissatisfaction for the users and some work for the Admins who have to collect the pictures and put them in a single place, but is the only way to avoid this problem as far as I know.
I have installed ST 12.0.1 for a customer using Docker, and initially I wanted to use MongoDB 6.0; installation was fine but MongoDB would not start.
The error thrown was this: Job for mongod.service failed because a fatal signal was delivered to the control process. See “systemctl status mongod.service” and “journalctl -xe” for details.
A quick search on the web gave me the reason of this:
MongoDB requires the following minimum x86_64 microarchitectures:
For Intel x86_64 , MongoDB requires one of:
a Sandy Bridge or later Core processor, or
a Tiger Lake or later Celeron or Pentium processor.
For AMD x86_64 , MongoDB requires:
a Bulldozer or later processor.
My customer server had a Xeon Gold 5120 which is below the required specs for Mongodb, and that was causing the error.
The only thing I could do was uninstall MongoDB 6.0 and install MongoDB 4.4, which starts without any issue.
So if you plan to use MongoDB 6.0 pay attention to the CPU type you have .
P.S. I never had this before, I run my test servers on a AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor machine, which is more than enough 🙂
AS probably you know OpenNTF has a Discord server, that everyone can join, where there are several “channels” (I know that the term is not correct) in which people can talk about specific topics.
We have just added one, “#suggestion-box” where everyone is encouraged to go if they have any idea on what OpenNTF should do; as my colleague Jesse Gallagher writes “we’d like to use it to take suggestions for improvements to our organization: our procedures, activities, infrastructure, and so forth”
So if you have any idea or suggestion for us, please join our server and go in the #suggestion-box to tell us.
I had two sessions at CollabSphere 2022 The first one “Useful Hacks for Domino Admins” together with my friend and partner-in-crime Marianna Tomasatti. The slides are here
You can find the video of our session on the CollabSphere website here
The second “Installing Sametime 12 and integrating with Verse and iNotes” was mostly a live demo. you can find the video on the CollabSphere website here
Upon suggestion from my friend Erik Schwalb of HCL, I upgraded to FP1 a Sametime12 server where I made some branding customization.
Contrary to what I wrote in my previous post not ALL customizations are kept.
If you made some branding, you will lose it. The directory /sametime-config will be deleted and replaced by a new one, so all the custom branding files in /sametime-config/web/branding will be gone.
Also, not all the settings in custom.env will be kept. If you applied branding adding, e.g. REACT_APP_PRODUCT_NAME=RoB ST Server REACT_APP_PRODUCT_LOGO=/images/branding/logo.jpg those settings will not be kept.
To check which settings are kept, look in install.sh, you will see that the upgrade maintains the default ones, e.g SAMETIME_PROXY_HOST=st.company.com.
If you enabled Let’s Encrypt support in .env you will lose it as well, since the Let’s Encrypt TLS cert in /sametime-config/web/acme-certs/ will be gone.
Again, check install.sh to see which settings are maintained in .env
So, the suggestion I have is to copy the sametime installation directory (you read my previous post, right?) and then after the upgrade copy back the /sametime-config directory and check the files custom.env .env and docker-compose.yml
Thanks a lot to Eric Schwalb for pointing me in this direction, since I didn’t applied customizations at my customer site, I did not notice that some settings are not kept.
