A Portal to a Portal

My IBM colleagues, En Hui Chen and Chao Feng Yang, have produced a potentially very useful document showing how IBM Tivoli Access Manager for e-Business ( aka TAMeB ) can be used to secure Lotus Connections, via a "front-end" reverse web proxy server.

Having spent some time playing around with the new blog and wiki templates in WP/WCM 6.1.5, one of my clients asked how a non-administrative user could create new blogs and add comments to existing blogs.

I realised that, in my limited exposure to the new components ( which are a very clever combination of portal page automation - creating new pages and adding components via a very nice GUI - and Lotus WCM content and resource libraries ), I'd done everything as the wpsadmin ID, which isn't particularly useful outside of my own Ubuntu-based demonstration environment.

Therefore, I dug into things a little bit more, and wrote up the following: -

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In order to meet the requirement of a non-admin user creating/editing blogs, you'd need to add the required additional users/groups to the Editor role of the WCM library that forms the basis of the blog itself.

As an example, I created a new page called My Blogs, and then used the Blog Template library to create a blogging site called Blog-o-matic ( I did this via the Edit Page -> Customise -> Add Blog Library dialogue, as the portal administrator - wpsadmin ).

This allowed me to create blogs within the library, and add posts and comments. Other users could see the page/blog library/blogs/comments, but weren't able to create their own blogs etc.

Therefore, as wpsadmin, I navigated to the Administration page, and selected Portal Content -> Web Content Libraries and then clicked the Set Permissions button. From the Resource Permissions page, I then hit the Edit Role button for the Editor role and, in my case, added the "group" All Authenticated Portal Users to that role.

This means that any portal user can now log in, access the My Blogs page, create a new blog, view and comment upon other people's blogs etc.

Depending upon your requirements, you may want to restrict the usage of certain blogs to certain user groups ( in LDAP ) rather than using All Authenticated Portal Users.

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And it looks sweet  ..

And here's a screenshot, by popular demand :-

Whilst helping out a friend, Mike, with a Lotus Mobile Connect on Ubuntu issue, I realised that I'd never actually written the solution up.

Mike was connected, via LMC to a VPN within the company network, whilst being connected to the intranet via a wired connection. All was well, apart from the fact that he was then unable to log in to the Sametime server that's on the intranet.

When we checked, it appeared that the LMC connection was updating the DNS name resolution ( on Linux, this is driven by the /etc/resolv.conf file ).

The solution ?

a) Disconnect from LMC
b) Open a command prompt
c) Navigate to the directory - /home/<USERNAME>/.wclient
d) Edit the file - connX.conf - where X is the number of the LMC connection needing change e.g. 0 for the first connection, 1 for the second connection etc.
e) Change GatewaySuppliesDNS=1 to GatewaySuppliesDNS=0
f) Save the file and reconnect via LMC

Having done this, Mike was able to connect to the VPN'd hosts via LMC whilst also connecting to Sametime, Notes etc. via the normal intranet.

Seemples !!

Saw this Flash this morning, and noted that it's relevant to a few portal projects on which I am currently working: -

Some very useful Lotus Connections troubleshooting resources from Rainier Varilla's excellent blog "RV has Parked!" here: -

Following an uninstall/reinstall of Lotus Notes 8.5.1 FP1 on my Macbook Pro, I started hitting this error message: -