I am in Las Vegas for the IBM Gold Consultant Briefing 2009 that is being held in conjunction with the IBM Information On Demand (IOD) 2009 conference. I am well into the Gold Briefing (4th day), and am suffering a wee bit from information overload as part of the IBM Information Led Transformation (ILT) initiative! Today IBM announced its impressive ILT initiative which I see as another evolutionary step in the Information On Demand journey that was kicked off 4 years back. IBM certainly has made huge investments in this space over this period – $12B with $8B in some major acquisitions and $4B in organic R&D. And the IM portfolio certainly looks quite comprehensive with a broad range of capabilities.

The Information Stack in IBM’s words has the following pieces -

• An Information Infrastructure comprised of software, servers, and storage that provides a foundation for your information.
• Trusted Information gives you a single view of data through offerings that enable you to transform silos of information into a trusted, strategic asset that is shared across your organization.
• Business Analytics and Performance Management enables you apply analytics to optimize your business through better decisions by providing planning, budgeting, forecasting, measuring, monitoring, reporting and analysis capabilities.

With IBM, you can never have enough brand names and enough churn in product names, to make staying on top of things a challenge! IBM has it all – the newer Optim, FileNet, InfoSphere, Cognos, SPSS, ILog solutions; the more traditional Db2, Informix, CMOD products; and the cloud and mashup buzzwords. I think technically very impressive but I sure do wish that it was easier to stay connected with all the brand/product names!

With the recent push to meet IBM’s requirements for business partner certifications, we have been working through the process of getting the required sales/technical certifications in a few areas that we were missing them. We certainly did not have all the sales certifications, and Xtivia has been working on getting them locked up. We already had the M197 IBM WebSphere Portal Family Sales Mastery and Related Lotus Products certification, but given that it was in my area of expertise, and I was curious what a sales certification test looked like, I took the test myself last week. And it lived up to my expectation – EASY, and I knocked it out in 33 minutes out of the available 90 minutes.

Today, I was asked by my boss if I could take the M159 WebSphere Sales Mastery Test for the Sales Professional v3 certification test as we needed it. Based on my earlier experience with M197, I fully expected this one to be a trivial task. IBM offers a virtual class “IBM TGVL: WebSphere Solutions & Competitive Selling” as prep for this test, but I was obviously too good to spend 16 hours preparing for a sales test (or so thought me and my inflated ego). Without further thought and effort, I launched the test and quickly realized that I was in trouble; not a good idea to skip the prep course! I spent 74 out of the allowed 75 minutes on the test, and my head was SPINNING – reading, and re-reading the questions and answers, and confusing the heck out of myself.

When I finally submitted my test, the Prometric site took over a full minute or more to grade it – that’s how tough the test was! The good news is that I passed it with some room to spare, but it certainly was not what I expected as a test for a sales guy. I guess if you do the prep course, you probably get exposed to all you need to know, and you can pass the test even if you are a sales guy. Yes, some major trash talking here! But seriously, I am not a believer in certifications proving that I can either implement or sell a particular solution – I have passed every cert test that I have ever taken – so no, it is not sour grapes talking! All these tests simply have some irrelevant questions – sometimes ingeniously framed to confuse candidates, but none that help in real-life scenarios.

However, at the end of it, I must admit that I am proudest that I managed to get this “WebSphere Solution Sales Professional” certification; more than when I got my “IBM Certified System Administrator – WebSphere Application Server, Network Deployment” or my “IBM Certified Solution Developer – IBM WebSphere Portal” or my “IBM Certified System Administrator – IBM WebSphere Portal” certifications. Yes, I know, blowing my horn hard, aren’t I!

PS: no malice intended towards any sales guys – I love them! Love them more when they close sales but love them nonetheless!

This is a quick blurb that may help somebody out with an issue that irks the heck out of me. I used to routinely encounter a problem with Microsoft Outlook 2003 on startup complaining -”The data file Personal Folders was not closed properly. The file is being checked for problems.” Outlook would then spend 30-60 seconds checking the file. While it would always pass the check, Outlook would not complete loading and allow me to read new messages until this check was done. It was more an irritant than anything else. Additionally, if I exited from Outlook, the Outlook process would never die off completely (unless I killed it in Task Manager or Process Explorer), compounding the problem further when I restarted Outlook.

I have tried several things over time to resolve this issue but none worked reliably until I used ScanPst. ScanPst is a Microsoft utility that can be used to repair corrupted PST files. On my Windows XP system, it is located at “C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033\SCANPST.EXE”. Anytime I run into the issues mentioned above, I close Outlook (ensure that the process is dead), launch ScanPst, scan all my PST files (I do have a few ), and repair any PST files that are reported as needing repairs. Relaunch Outlook, and voila – the problem is gone!

PS: You can find more information about ScanPST and using it at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287497.

After quite a break from IBM Tivoli Directory Server (and deep hands-on technical stuff in general), I helped one of my teammates set up multi-master (aka peer-to-peer) replication between two ITDS servers. Setting up replication was a breeze once we had the two LDAP servers up and running, but getting to that initial state turned into bit of a nightmare. We initially tried to take a shortcut to setting up replication by importing a LDIF into both the LDAP servers that had all the replication entries pre-configured. However, I think there was an issue with the LDIF, and the shortcut did not work out. We then edited the LDIF file to remove the replication related entries, and tried to import the LDIF into ITDS using the ITDS Configuration tool after recreating the LDAP DB2 database. We had done this a couple of times with the LDIF that contained the replication entries with no issues, but when we attempted to bulkload the LDIF without the replication entries, the import failed, and all we got was an error message to the effect that the file was in use by another process. That error message totally threw us off! We were unsure about what file was in use thereby resulting in the error message and causing the bulkload to fail. Our suspicions centered around the LDIF file and we closed all processes that could have the LDIF file open, and based on a suggestion from my coworker, we tried searching for an open handle to the LDIF file using the “Sysinternals Process Explorer” tool. However all of this was in vain, and then our suspicion fell on the LDIF file being invalid syntactically. Tried a different LDIF file but got the same error message, and we figured that the file was ok. After wasting more time on this, we tried a brand new and simple ldif file with only a couple of entries. The bulkload for that file actually worked but we still got the same error message about “file in use by another process”. So, in the end, the “file in use” error message turned out to be a red herring – we were getting that message on both a success and a failure during bulkload – so much for error messaging!

Not so good, IBM!

I am really excited about this new offering from our business unit – the official press release went out today and I could not resist blogging about it even though I am getting a bit salesy here! As Dennis said in the press release – we have been providing remote WebSphere administration and development services for various client installations that included WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment, WebSphere Portal, and IBM Web Content Management. These services ranged from complete outsourcing of all WebSphere administration and maintenance needs, to on-demand consulting and mentoring. So, in essence, we have now codified these services that we have been offering for years, into pre-packaged offerings that make it simpler for prospects and customers to understand the value proposition of Xtivia’s remote WebSphere services.

An excerpt from the news release -

Virtual-WebSphereAdmin provides a cost-effective solution for organizations seeking to optimize the availability and performance of their critical WebSphere-based business information systems. This is accomplished through a comprehensive remote WebSphere Administration service designed specifically to meet the WebSphere administration, maintenance, management and consulting needs of our clients. Xtivia’s Virtual-WebSphereAdmin service combines a sophisticated suite of monitoring and reporting tools with expert consulting services to deliver complete WebSphere performance management.

You can find more details about this service at http://www.xtivia.com/remote-services/virtual-websphereadmin or you can go directly to http://www.xtivia.com/request-information to get in touch with the Xtivia sales team about this service. I am confident that you will find it worth your time to do so!

We recently switched one of our client’s WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Portal based infrastructure to a new physical environment. During our testing we found that we were getting stale connection exceptions in SystemOut.log and in the application logs. On digging a little deeper, our team tracked it down to the fact that the Cisco firewall was dropping our Oracle database connections after they had been inactive for a certain amount of time. When our team discussed the issue with the network team, they were essentially told that all was good with the network infrastructure. The application team tweaked some of the connection pool settings but that only helped alleviate the issue slightly and we started encountering performance issues. Eventually, we figured out a solution that works!

The solution that we ended up with was to work around this issue on the Oracle end. We modified the sqlnet.expire_time parameter in sqlnet.ora on the Oracle 10g server down from the default “30″ (30 minutes) to “1″ (1 minute).

The explanation on why this worked

The parameter SQLNET.EXPIRE_TIME is used to specify the time interval, in minutes, to send a probe to verify that client/server connections are active. If the probe finds a terminated connection, or a connection that is no longer in use, it returns an error, causing the server process to exit. This parameter is primarily intended for the database server so that it can free up server-side resources that are not in use.

A side-effect of the probe is that there is TCP-IP activity between the client and the server each time the probe is executed, and the firewall designates the link as an active one. By lowering the probe interval down to a minute, we managed to fool the firewall into leaving the database connections in the connection pool alone, and not terminate them even though the client may not execute a query using the connection for an extended period of time.

I am sure you can tweak the value of this parameter to determine the optimal value for your firewall and situation; dropping down the sqlnet.expire_time to a minute is probably too radical and redundant in reality. Even though the probe generated by this setting is small, it still does generate network traffic that may be meaningful in some situations.

Over the weekend, I reinstalled Windows XP on a work laptop as my laptop had finally accumulated enough junk and had slowed down enough to make this time investment worthwhile. I had figured that I would need to go into the office to join the laptop to the office Windows domain. However, I was able to VPN in and join the domain without any issues. The next challenge was to login using my Active Directory domain account remotely (outside my office – from home) when I had never logged in to the domain on this laptop.

It appeared that this would be more challenging than it turned out to be.  My initial thought was to use the “dial-up” option on the Windows XP login screen. Nope, that did not work as the dial-up option is to establish a basic internet connection and does not allow you to establish a VPN connection. I did some googling and finally stumbled upon the solution. Once you have added the computer to the domain remotely over a VPN connection, follow these steps -

1. Login to Windows using a local computer account.
2. Connect using VPN to the remote network where the domain controller resides.
3. Hit Ctrl-Alt-Del
4. Lock the computer
5. Hit Control-Alt-Delete again
6. Login using your domain account – it will work!

Simple, huh!

Hey – no blogging for 5+ months and now 2 entries in a day!! Striking while the iron is hot.

You can never have enough backups – I am certainly a believer in that adage. My laptop backups consist of the following -

• I manually create ghost images of my laptop onto an external USB hard drive once a month – these come in handy if the hard drive crashes or if Windows is corrupted. I keep the external hard drive at home.
• I back up key folders on my laptop onto NAS storage at work using Robocopy – this is incredibly fast to backup large folders that only have small changes. And it is fast enough for large changes as well.
• I back up my Outlook PST files using Retrospect onto NAS storage at work because of open file support.
• I have recently started to back up Outlook PST files and other key folders using Mozy Home – in case you don’t know about Mozy, it is an EMC offering that provides secure, remote, online backups.

While I have never restored from Mozy, I certainly have had ocassion to use my other backups at various times. Mozy seems to be (to be verified) great insurance if things go horribly wrong!

Earlier this week, I suddenly had a problem with my laptop not rebooting cleanly. It sat on the black screen with the Windows logo and the blue progress bar forever. I tried giving it time (almost 20 minutes) but to no avail. I eventually rebooted into safe mode successfully, but even there Windows Explorer was taking a long time to open up. I ran chkdsk -f but that did not help me boot into normal mode.  I gave up pretty damn quickly and ended up just restoring my latest laptop image onto a spare Dell Latitude D830, and using a crossover cable between my two laptops to copy over the files (robocopy to the rescue to quickly sync over files). I was up and running on my spare laptop in ~4 hours.

But the next day, I installed a Windows update and had to reboot and to my dismay, I was stuck yet again on the reboot. After a little bit of digging, I finally tracked it down.

The previous week I had completed my inital Mozy backup that took almost a couple of weeks using the default backup sets recommended by Mozy. I then added a bunch of key folders to my backup sets, and one of those folders has a couple of hundred thousand+ files. I remembered that I had just added those folders to my backup sets on the day that my laptop froze on reboot, and I had another key data point that if I logged in using the local administrator account in safe mode, Windows Explorer would open up quickly where as it took 5+ minutes to open up using my domain account. I ended up editing my Mozy configuration such that I turned on the “don’t show restore menu in Windows Explorer” and the “don’t show the virtual drive in My Computer” options.  Once I did that and rebooted in normal mode, I was good to go! Obviously, the Mozy Home integration with Windows Explorer has some issues and/or limitations. For now, I am running without the restore menu and Mozy virtual drive, and I am good. I really do need to test out the Mozy restore to verify that works – a backup without a functional restore ain’t very useful!

Yes, I am back from the dead! It has been a long time since I blogged – just been very busy and blogging fell by the wayside. Recently one of the developers on my team ran into an issue with a custom theme when he applied the 6.0.1.5 fixpack on a WebSphere Portal 6.0.x.x server. The theme was exhibiting some very odd behavior – HTML snippets in the output were getting randomly misplaced – i.e. the HTML output was getting garbled with some HTML incorrectly appearing before other HTML, and the theme was having visual issues. And the odd thing was that only one of the custom themes was exhibiting the issue while other themes seemed to work well, making him believe that there was something wrong with the failing theme. He had a PMR open with IBM support for 2+ weeks but that had got him nowhere with getting the issue resolved. So I finally got involved in helping him out  and in a few minutes found this IBM technote that appeared to be related to the issue at hand. As per the technote the resolution was to simply set the buffer to none in the pages declaration. In the theme default.jsp file, we changed the page declaration to the following:

<%@ page buffer=”none” %>

That was all it took, but I sure do wish that support could actually prove to be useful once in a while and use their own tools (technotes) to resolve PMRs quickly. Of course, given that the technote was a public one, the WebSphere Portal community ought to be able to use the IBM Support Site effectively too.

Those of you who have been following my Dell Latitude D830 laptop freeze saga, know that I have been struggling for 3+ months with my laptop simply stopping to respond to mouse clicks/keys.  The only way out used to be a hard reset using the power button. In the comments section of my previous post, I had documented all the tweaks that I had tried in hope of resolving the issue, and many people pitched in with their ideas and experience as this is a fairly widespread issue. Well, since my latest changes, I have been freeze free for the last 3+ weeks, and I think I am finally ready to declare victory.

So what might have resolved my freeze issue? I think the key issue is nView – Nvidia’s multi-display software that runs by default on a Dell laptop with a Nvidia video card.  While, I do use dual displays at work and love them, you can manage dual displays just fine using built-in Windows capabilities. So, if you are experiencing freeze issues, consider performing the following steps -

1. Disable nView COMPLETELY - all the startup programs related to nView (NvCpl, NvMcTray, nwiz) and the NVIDIA Display Driver Service (NVSvc). This is a necessary step to resolving the freeze issue but may not be the only step.
2. Update the nVidia driver – I know that I had tried disabling nView but that did not resolve my freeze issue. I then performed several steps and one of them was to update the nVidia Quadro NVS 140M driver to 174.31 XP WHQL, A05, and I suspect that might have been a critical step.
3. Apply Windows XP SP3 - again, I am not sure if this is needed to resolve the freezes, but I know I did this and it is probably not a bad thing to do if you are running XP.
4. Change power options – again, may not be necessary, but I tend to do this anyways – turn off hard disk sleep in power options.
5. Apply BIOS update – patched my BIOS to A13 – this one I really doubt had anything to do with fixing my issue but I did do this before my issue was finally resolved.

I just hope that I don’t have to eat my words that my freeze issue has been resolved – I don’t really have the time to deal with this anymore!

In case, this post helps you get past your freeze issue,  do post a quick comment as that might help others who are experiencing the same issue. All the best!