Thursday, November 2, 2017

Brainfart from me! ssl_enabled=true is really, really important even though the service is disabled!!

OMG, I just had a huge brainfart!!

I had an issue on a Connections 5.5 CR3 site where the option to get notified about "Libraries" was in the GUI.


But the problem was that ECM has never been installed on this system, nor on a previously migrated system!!

I also had the Indexing tasks set to "all_configured" which gave me indexing errors in SystemOut.log:
[11/1/17 23:16:02:974 CET] 0000170f InitialWorkFa E com.ibm.connections.search.index.process.initial.InitialWorkFactory createCrawlingWork CLFRW0295E: Problem starting indexing for the ecm_files service, as part of the indexing task with the following details: ecm_files
                                 com.ibm.connections.search.common.registries.CrawlerUnavailableException: CLFRW0313E: Attempt by crawler registry to retrieve an unconfigured search service ecm_files. Check your Lotus-Connections-config.xml file.
....

Head scratcher!

I looked everywhere. The LotusConnections-config.xml file had the "ecm_files" set to be disabled.
The notification-config.xml also gave me nothing.

I reached out to the fabulous Skype team and it turned out that this was a weird issue.

Until Christoph Stoettner reached out and asked to get a copy of the LotusConnections-config.xml file.
He then discovered that the "ecm_files" service had the "ssl_enabled" set to true.

<sloc:serviceReference bootstrapHost="admin_replace" bootstrapPort="admin_replace" clusterName="" enabled="false" serviceName="ecm_files" ssl_enabled="true">

I also noticed this earlier, and never gave it a second thought!!

In all my years of working with IBM Connections, I always thought that when the service had "enabled=false" then that was it! I though that it did not matter if "ssl_enabled=true" was set, because I was under the impression that this only had to do with the fact that you are enabling the service to work over HTTPS.

Christoph proved me wrong! Lesson learned!!

After setting the "ssl_enabled=false" for the "ecm_files" in the LotusConnections-config.xml file, synced the nodes and restarted the News application, then the "Libraries" was gone from the list of notification options in the GUI.


And I also restarted the Search application, and now I don´t have any indexing errors in the SystemOut.log file neither.

The only documentation about this is in a version 3.0.1 infocenter HERE.

So, to sum up: enabled=true means that you enable the service for HTTP. ssl_enabled means that you enable it for HTTPS. Enabled=false does not mean that you disable the entire service!

Thanks Christoph, I owe you not one, but two beers!

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