Signed up for Pulse 2010 yet?

Granted the recession of late has curtailed spending all around, but for many IT departments there are still a number of high priority projects especially in security. If you are already an IBM shop, the Pulse conference is a great way to get a deeper look into the products and solutions that you are considering for the new year. You will spend the time and money doing this research anyhow. Why not come out to Vegas for a look under the hood?

Pulse represents a pretty large swath of products. Unlike Lotusphere which focuses Lotus and Portal, the Pulse conference covers all things Tivoli. There are over 300 products in the Tivoli brand so this conference is a bit different than Lotusphere. If you are into Asset Management or Performance and Monitoring, there are specific tracks for you. If you are interested in Security, there is a whole other track for you as well. Within each area, there are a number of presentations from customers demonstrating recent deployments where you will get the real scoop on what their projects were like, the good and the bad. This alone is worth the visit if you are planning a project with Tivoli software this year. Also, you can stop in the hands on labs and actually work directly with the software so that you can get a feel for how the product really works. The labs are staffed by the IBM education team and there are some really sharp people there who can work through the labs with you.

Pulse also has areas setup where you can "ask the experts" just about anything. These are basically casual "sit down and chat" spaces where you can be face to face with folks from the product development teams and ask questions. Nothing is too complicated that you cannot get an answer at Pulse.

Business Partners and 3rd party vendors setup shop in the showcase floor to show you how they implement the IBM solutions. You may get some really good ideas from these folks how best to leverage the IBM solutions as well as find help getting started with an implementation.

The technical sessions are a great way to get a look at some of the other products and solutions you may not have thought about before. There is something here for everyone from c-level folks right down to the hands on IT person so I recommend you come on out and see for yourself. It's well worth the expense.

BTW, the recreation is not all bad either. While I do not enjoy gambling, being in Vegas is a spectacle. The Pulse Palooza isn't a bad time either. Free beer!

Register for Pulse 2010 --> http://www-01.ibm.com/software/tivoli/pulse/

Get a look at what's going on at Pulse 2010 --> https://www-950.ibm.com/communities/service/html/communityview?communityUuid=dd8bf011-85af-48da-a4dd-21047a08c33e

Which product version do you have?

The Tivoli security products contain several components and middleware making it sometimes difficult to know exactly what versions and fix packs you are at for all of the pieces. Also, you may only need this information once in a while maybe for troubleshooting a problem or planning some upgrade or change to the environment. So you ask, "what was that command again to determine the version of TIM, TAM, WAS, TDI, etc...? And as usual for every piece of the puzzle the commands or procedure for determining the versions and fix packs are different. Then, finding this information on the IBM Support site or the Information Center for some pieces is difficult. You would think that for each product the first chapter of the Problem Determination Guide would start with "How to determine your product version and fix pack level". NOT!

I'm simply listing here the results of my hour and 1/2 of internet searches here to hopefully save time when I need this info again. There are by the way some very good IBM Wiki sites for this info. I've listed some below. It's crazy though that these Wiki's did not show up in my searches of the IBM Support site.

Check Version Info for TDS 5.2

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=767&context=SSVJJU&q1=version&uid=swg21268258&loc=en_US&cs=utf-8&lang=en

Example:

rpm –qa | grep ldap
rpm –qa | grep db2
rpm –qa | grep gsk
ls –l /usr/ldap/bin
ibmslapd -V

If the Web Administration Tool is installed and configured please collect the output of:
ls -l /usr/ldap/idstools/IDSWebApp.war

Check for version info for TDS 6.0

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=767&context=SSVJJU&q1=version&uid=swg21268261&loc=en_US&cs=utf-8&lang=en

Example:

rpm -qa | grep -i ldap
rpm -qa | grep -i db2
rpm -qa | grep -i gsk
ibmslapd -V
idsilist -a

If the Web Administration Tool is installed and configured collect the output from:
./opt/ibm/ldap/V6.0/idstools/deploy_IDSWebApp.sh -v

Check for version info for TDS 6.1

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=767&context=SSVJJU&q1=version&uid=swg21268263&loc=en_US&cs=utf-8&lang=en

Example:

/opt/ibm/ldap/V6.1/bin/idsversion
rpm -qa | grep -i gsk
idsilist -a

If you are using DB2 v9.1 or higher issue the following command:
/usr/local/bin/db2ls

Otherwise issue:
rpm -qa | grep -i db2

If the Web Administration Tool is installed and configured, please collect the following:
/opt/IBM/ldap/V6.1/idstools/deploy_IDSWebApp -v

Check version of the TDS Web Admin Tool (Any version)

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=767&context=SSVJJU&q1=version&uid=swg21320615&loc=en_US&cs=utf-8&lang=en

Check for Version of WebSphere

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=638&context=SSPREK&q1=version&uid=swg21306756&loc=en_US&cs=utf-8&lang=en

Example:

versionInfo.sh in the app_server_root\bin directory.

Check for version info for TAMeB

http://www.ibm.com/software/info/testinfo.jsp?uid=IC000043

Example:

pdversion

Check for version info for TIM

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/tivoliim/Determining+Product+Fixpack+Levels

From the TIM Admin Console, open the "About" page

Example:

Server name: secperf12
Version: 5.0.0.3
Build number: 200809241018
Maintenance level: IF0014
Build date: September 24 2008
Build time: 10:18:08 GMT-05:00

Check for version info for GSKit

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/tivoliim/Determining+IBM+GSKit+Fixpack+Level

Check for version info for TDI 6.0

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/tivoliim/Determining+IBM+Tivoli+Directory+Integrator+Fixpack+Level

Check for version info for TDI 6.1

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21302983

Example:

Unix/Linux -
1) cd /usr/ibm/common/acsi/bin
2) //source the setenv.sh
. /var/ibm/common/acsi/setenv.sh
3) //run the listIU.sh
./listIU.sh | grep -i tdiserversiu


Check for version info for TIM Agents

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=644&context=SSTFWV&dc=DA420&dc=DA480&dc=DA490&dc=DA430&dc=DA410&dc=DB600&dc=DA400&dc=D600&dc=D700&d

c=DB520&dc=DB510&dc=DA500&dc=DA470&dc=DA4A20&dc=DA460&dc=DA440&dc=DB550&dc=DB560&dc=DB700&dc=DB530&dc=DA4A10&dc=DA4A30&dc=DB540&q1=version&uid=s

wg21140454&loc=en_US&cs=utf-8&lang=en

Example:

Run agentCfg -> Configuration Settings

Whew! The fingers are a bit rusty.

I sort of feel like I've neglected a child or something. The past year has been so overwhelmingly busy that I have failed to keep this blog up to date in any meaningful way. I hope to change that this year as I continue on this path doing Tivoli Security.

Anyhow, besides a siginficant amount of traveling over most of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, I had also embarked on a major home construction project. It seems my whole life is about projects even at home. So just in case someone thinks that I have been sitting on my duff and not posting things to my blog here is a small glimps into my home project:

First off just to provide a prospective, I was involved in a fairly complex TIM/TAM/TFIM project on the East coast for all of 2008 and the first part of 2009. So, I would often leave my home in Buffalo on Monday morning and travel back home on Thursday night or Friday. Practically every weekend and any week nights I had available in 2008 were spent finishing my basement.

The kids were in need of some rec space. Living in the North you tend to spend several months in hibernation so finishing the basement was essential to providing a little more space for the kids to be kids. On top of that I desparately needed an office. It's been too long that my filing cabinets had been stored in my walk in closet off our master bedroom. Then my wife was also getting fed up with me camping out at our dining room table to do my work. Picture two lap tops, two external hard drives, power stripss laying across the dining room floor and papers strewn across the dining room table. Of course all of those Tivoli lab guides and classroom materials and CDs laying around doesn't help either.

So, I finished my basement and in all this took about 10 months between February 2008 and December 2008. I still have some trim work and doors to do and of course we will have to furnish it now. Feel free to view my pictures on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/cahart

Before:

After:

Welcome to my Blogs New Home

Since I changed jobs last month I've been looking for a new home for my blog. I used to host this at my former employer on a Domino server. I used to be a Lotus Domino Administrator so running my blog on a Domino box made sense to me. And Domino is a great platform for collaboration apps like blogs so it was a "no brainer". As gracious as my former employer was in continuing to host my blog for a while after my leaving, it was still necessary to move it.

I had something all lined up to host it on another Domino server run by a different company and then there was the option of hosting it at my new employer's Domino server as well. All this indecision is why there have been so few postings to this blog lately. This content resides at my old employer, my new employer and now here not because I like to copy this content multiple times, but because I was hoping to continue running this on Domino.

I switched to blogger because Google offers some pretty cool functionality along with the new googlepages all for free. So I can create regular web pages and store my attachments like documentation I compile, cheat sheets, and code snippets on googlepages and link to this content from the blog. These tools are actually faster than the experience I was having with the Domino blog using my Notes client as the blog admin tool. Still it was nice having the blog self contained in a single NSF file, but I decided to give blogger a whirl. I'm looking into creating a twiki that I can link to the blog and my googlepages as well.

Now that the blog has finally moved I look forward to posting more again.

Handy tool for your bag of tricks

My friend Thom Anderson turned me on to this tool a long time ago. I can't believe it took me this long to actually try it out. We are building TIM and TAM on a pSeries (AIX) box so there is no GUI like you get on the Linux environment. Some of the internal people use other products to help in managing their AIX systems. I really have little experience with AIX, but since we are installing on that platform we need an x windows environment to run the installs of TIM, WAS, TDS, TAM, etc.... Cygwin {link} is a pretty easy tool to install and configure. It looked a lot more complicated when Thom showed it to me a while back, but it's not a big deal at all. There is a another good web site that describes how to install it here {link} (thanks Andy) so it's pretty straight forward.

What I like about Cygwin is that I don't have to startup KDE or Gnome on my Linux system (saves some horsepower on my VMs) and I can still run all the software that requires x windows. For SLES 9 you will need to install the openSSH packages from Cygwin because Telnet is not enabled by default. Once you have installed the packages follow these steps to connect up to your Sles 9 machine:

1.) Launch Cygwin


2.) Type startx

3.) To ssh to your linux machine, type:

ssh -Y -l

4.) From here you can launch any program that requires xwindows (I.e. TIM, TAM, TDS, WAS Graphical Installations, etc...)

Things have been crazy...

Obviously there are these large gaps in time between my postings. Well lets just say that things have been crazy my first two weeks on the new job. The customer I'm working with right now has security policies in place which prevents me from posting to my blog during the day (and rightfully so) not to mention that when we are deep into configuration of TIM and TAM the last thing I'm thinking about is this blog. So the only time I can post is obviously after hours. Up until last Friday I didn't have a machine other than my home computer and since receiving the new computer I've spent most of my nights just installing all the software needed to build out my new sandbox for TIM/TAM. Whew!

I'm still looking for a new home for my blog. I thought I had something all lined up, but that has not materialized yet. I may actually have to switch from a Domino based blog to some free service like Blogger or something. In the meantime, I finally installed VMWare on my new machine and have built a new TIM server (Only took me 2 days this time) and now I'm just getting going on preparing a TAM server.

I was thinking (should have thought about this sooner) that if I hadn't already built my TIM server maybe it would have been better to build a DB2/TDS server to hold a single Instance with all the databases for TIM and TAM. In other words the TIM LDAP DB, TIM Transaction DB, and TAM User Registry DB all on one DB2 server in the same instance with TDS installed there to run both LDAPs. Then on a separate VM I could install just WAS and TIM and the DB2 Client to connect to the necessary DB2 databases. And then for TAM I would just install the TAM code pointing to the DB2/TDS server for it's LDAP. I'm not sure if this would have been a more efficient way to run a TIM/TAM environment on my Laptop or not. I have 80GB of space and 3GB or RAM so I'm just trying to maximize the horsepower I have. Either way, my TIM server is already done at this point:

host name: tim
OS: SLES 9
Disk: 10GB
Components:
TIM v4.6 FP33, IF38
TDS 6 FP3, IF2
DB2 v8.1 (Included with TIM TDS)
WAS 5.1 (with fixpacks included from TIM Suppl)

One thing I noticed when installing this was how fast my laptop performed. When I installed this on a Dell PowerEdge 2650 Server (loaded) I remember the WAS 5.1 install took soooo long (hours even) yet on ThinkPad T60p Core 2 Duo {Review} I blew through the install in under 15 minutes. Not sure how that could be, but I was pleasantly surprised. One thing I did differently in this case than the last time I built a sandbox is I used only one DB2 instance for both the TIM LDAP DB and the TIM Transaction DB. I wanted to limit the overhead as best as possible so instead of loading up two separate DB2 instances to do this I figured I would try with only one Instance containing both databases. Maybe you would or would not do this in production depending on the desires of your DB2 Admins and the hardware you are running on.

Next job to do is build out my TAM sandbox. That's what I'm working on the weekend in between other household duties. :-)

Crossed over to the other side...

So last week I was an IBM customer. This week I am an IBM Business Partner. Or another way of putting it I was a customer, now I'm a consultant. New role, new hat, new perspective on many things.

Day1:
My first day on the new job was your usual orientation type of thing. How to access the various HR and house keeping applications. How time is managed, who the important people are when you need help, etc.... It was a very productive day. One of the highlights was a fabulous Chinese restaurant P.F. Chang's China Bistro. Now usually I would prefer a local restaurant to a chain, but this was outstanding. Chang's Spicy Chicken was sooo good. Just melted in your mouth. They have these lettuce wraps with I think chicken or pork and you literally place the mixture in these little lettuce "cups" and wrap it up like a tortilla. Then we had the Pin Rice Noodle Soup which was awesome. It had a good kick to it, but not too much. The best part of P.F. Chang's is that you leave feeling satisfied, but not sick like I often do after eating from a typical fast food Chinese restaurant. I wish we had a P.F. Changs here in the Buffalo area. This is well worth it if you ever find one near by.

Day2:
Right into the fire, my second day was at a customer site. This is where I will likely be for quite a while aside from a bunch of scheduled training I have between now and July 1. So I hooked up with most of the project team from my company and partner companies along with some folks employed by the customer. Quite a team of people here. So far we are well into architecture with a Tivoli architect (ITIM) guy, a TAM guy (IBM), some project managers (our side, customer side) and an army of various technical and managerial folks. I'm shadowing for now to build on the experience and knowledge I already have and hopefully I'll be contributing during the implementation phase.

So off I go learning as much as I can about the needs of my new customer and how we will solve those needs with Tivoli software.

Career move just a few days away...

Changing jobs is no small feat when you are leaving on good terms. My last day is tomorrow 2/16/07 and I've spent the last 2 weeks wrapping up the architecture phase of the Identity Management project here, trying to transfer knowledge, files, company owned gadgets, etc... to the people that need them. This is certainly a big job when you have accumulated 10 years of data and what not. Just updating everyone I know with my new contact information is a big job. I think I've worked 8:00am until Midnight for the last 2 weeks straight. I did take some time off this past Saturday to take the kids sledding though.

Some time ago I committed myself (no, not to an asylum) to Identity and Access Management. I took this plunge about 1.5 years ago when our organization wanted to build an enterprise LDAP which included the aggregation of identities from over 100 customer organizations each with slightly different technologies and standards for maintaining their user accounts. This was a big jump for me because I has spent the prior 7 or 8 years dedicated to Domino and a few before that to Novell. But this sounded like a great challenge so I started with Tivoli Directory Integrator (truly remarkable product in my opinion) to build assembly lines to connect to Novell, Active Directory, and Domino Directory servers pulling user accounts into Tivoli Directory Server. But, I said, "What about the users' passwords?". We can easily pull all these identities into an enterprise LDAP just fine, but we will ultimately be talking about over 200,000 users. How will we maintain a password policy? How will we convey to these users what their original name and password is and prompt them to change it after their first login? That's a job for Tivoli Identity Manager. Now to take a step back, why would we build this enterprise LDAP in the first place? WebSphere Portal and any portal delivered applications is the answer. So the primary driver for building the LDAP was to allow all of these users to login and access applications we intend to roll out. Early on we knew that TIM and TAM would be required so when we finally purchased that software and started to install and play around with it, a few things became clear to me:

1.) I had a lot more to learn about the Tivoli software
2.) This project was going to be a long and hard one

Both of these things spell challenge to me and I really love a challenge. So I committed to learning all I can about TIM, TAM, TDS, and the various ways to deal with Identity Management.. But to become an expert in this field will require something more than I can get by staying here in this job. As much as I loved my current position, it's going to take a different type of job for me to really learn this stuff. Alas, I am leaving my role in K-12 education and joining IBM Premium Business Partner Strategic Computer Solutions, Inc. out of Syracuse, NY. With this new position, I'll be on an accelerated pace of learning and I'll be exposed to more experts in the field than if I stayed here. I anticipate the change to be a positive career move which should enable me to make a difference in many more ways down the road. I'm psyched about the new opportunity and look forward to adding value to the Tivoli brand and of course the SCS team.

So, I'm working on moving this blog so that I can continue posting my experiences with the Tivoli Security software along the way. Hopefully my postings will somehow help someone else who has to go through the same learning curve I am going through. And since there aren't really any bloggers out there for TIM and TAM, hey it's something new to talk about. OK, not exactly as exciting as Notes and Domino, but middleware is not all that glamorous. So what.

VA déjà vu

It happens again and again. People's identity data is compromised by the loss of a computer, hard drive or some system gets hacked. In fact for the VA this is tragically the second time in only months. See Computerworld {Link}. It's just unbelievable to me that these employees need to work with thousands of records on a local drive for any reason. First of all the article isn't clear how many records were compromised. Is it 48,000 or 20,000? I wish these articles would explain why these records were on an external hard drive in the first place. What project could this person been working on where he/she could not access the records as needed from a secured database or something? Why aren't the records on a server in a locked data center? Going back to May 2006 why was an employee carrying around 26 million records on a lap top? Now that would be helpful information in the article.

When I hear about these breaches it makes me stop and think about the project I've been involved in for the last 2 years and the projects coming up where I'll be dealing with employee identity data. When developing a TDI assembly line to pull user attributes from one system to another it's very common to test it with simple CSV or flat files for the source or destination of that data. I remember developing an assembly line to read thousands of users from one system and write the records to an LDAP. To test this I would first output the data to a file. This testing might occur many times over and over. These files may end up on various directories of my computer (lap top) which undoubtedly would go home with me at night. Maybe I'll stop at the Gym on the way home or the grocery store. Next thing you know my car gets broken into and I'm the next cause of a security breach at my company.

Well luckily I don't keep these files on my lap top really. Also lucky for me I don't happen to be dealing with personal information. But these security breaches have to make you stop and think if you are like me and happen to deal identity data from time to time. I guess the simple lesson is don't keep information like this on your machine. Make up a pile of bogus users if you have to test your assembly lines. If you need to test with real users do it on a secured machine that won't be sitting on the back seat of your car after 5:00pm.

You know what Tivoli needs? Tivolisphere!

For the past 7 years or so I've worked with Lotus Notes and Domino. There is such a passionate community of Notes/Domino supporters, users, bloggers, and innovators. Why not, it's collaboration and what better suite of products are there to collaborate about then the best tools to do it with?

So every year like a cult following Lotusphere in Orlando re-energizes this community with great speakers, hands on labs, and forums to speak with the makers of some of the greatest software available. Having been to a handful of past Lotusphere conferences myself I can say from experience it's the best conference I've ever attended. I've made many contacts there, learned a lot and had a blast doing it.

There should be a Tivolisphere. Obviously the Tivoli product suite is a bit less visible than Notes and Domino, but the best thing about Lotusphere is the ability to network and meet people sharing the same experiences. Tivoli Identity Manager and Tivoli Access Manager are not the simplest of products to wrap your arms around. It would be so helpful if there was a place like Lotusphere were Tivoli professionals could experience the various ways the product is being used in the real world, and work with the developers to find solutions to problems. Maybe someday there will be third party ISVs developing solutions using Tivoli and then hopefully a new cult following will develop.

For now, I don't plan on giving up my interest in Notes and Domino. While my professional role has changed a bit in the last year, I still plan to keep my hands in the Lotus cookie jar from time to time. This year at Lotusphere 2007 I'm sorry to miss one of the biggest years in a long time. (I attended Lotusphere 2002 just months after 9/11 and it wasn't a great turnout and each year after it got better and better). Who could miss Bill Buchan's 40th birthday? Or the 13th annual Turtle Party (not really sure if it's 13, but I think Turtle's been there that many times)? Or Ed Brill's presentations? The showcase floor is sold out. That's never happened in any of the years I was there.

Well, maybe next year I'll be lucky enough to attend. This year I'll just be lurking all the blog sites, watching Lotusphere Live and just imagining what it's like to be there.

Buffalo get's pounded...

Wow, no one was ready for this one! Thursday evening we left work around 4:00pm. It was snowing, but not too bad. Traffic was slow though and we in my car pool were yelling at the slow pokes who forgot how to drive in the snow. Actually the roads seemed more like it was just raining because the snow wasn't really sticking to the roads yet. It was only 45 degress or so anyhow. Well as we got into Amherst it just got worse and worse. We stopped at our car pool spot and I cleaned off my car. The snow was so heavy it was like 4 inches of slush with a few inches of powder on top. Instead of going to the gym like I normally would on a Thursday I figured going straight home would be smarter because traffic would just be getting worse as the later it got. Good thing too because later that night people all over the Buffalo area started loosing power. We were fine at our house so I really didn't think anything of it.

The next morning though it was like Armageddon outside. The snow was just pounding the area and the trees and bushes were being flattened by the heavy slush/snow combination. I got up at about 6:30am thinking that I would still be going to work, but soon figured out everything was shut down. By mid day we saw reports that over 300,000 people were without power. Now usually a power outage in our area might last just a few hours, but the snow was bringing down trees all over Buffalo and the surrounding suburbs and taking power lines with them. I'll have to post some pictures as soon as I find a cable to transfer them off my camera phone. In the meantime pictures can be found:

http://www.wgrz.com/news/gallery/default.aspx