A new year

It's been just under a year since I last posted...


I've resolved to update much more often this year!

Not that it will be hard, of course...

One of my first decisions will be how to continue with this blog. Perhaps the Tivoli stuff should be offloaded to an IBM managed blog?

I'll think about it during the week.

--Robert

A new fix pack for TADDM - 7.2.0.0-TIV-ITADDM-FP0004

A new fix pack is out for TADDM. This one doesn’t have anything really major, just lots of bugfixes.

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24028518

A lot of them seem to center around Out Of Memory and Storage Errors during discovery or just having the discovery engine or console hanging.

Unless you’ve got specific problems, there’s no reason to get excited over this one.

On the other hand, TADDM 7.2.1, which will lots and lots of NEW shiny features, should be coming out quite soon.

I wonder if anyone is (a) reading this and (b) as excited as I am about it :)

-- Robert

Astronomy Picture of the Day : 2011 begins

After just under a year without new classical content, here are a few new Astronomy Pictures of the Day with classical content:

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110117.html - Night and Day above Almost Planet Sounio

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110114.html - Quadrantids over Qumis

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110109.html - The Antikythera Mechanism

-- Robert

Direct upgrade from OMEGAMON Platform 350/360 to the current IBM Tivoli Monitoring release is not supported

Recently I encountered this error while installing support files on the TEPS together with a colleague.

At first we thought that perhaps it was a problem with the files we had downloaded, but trying to reinstall something that had just succeeded failed with the same message.

The cause of the problem seems to be a corruption in the file
C:\IBM\ITM\INSTALLITM\ver\KINWIINSMSTR.ver

Replacing it with the .bck file (which resided in the same directory) solved the problem.

Well, I haven’t posted in quite a while… but I’m back!
-- Robert

Extended Attributes Sensor

When using TADDM, you will probably come across a case where you want to extract information which TADDM does not do out of the box.

For example, you want to record the date on which the antivirus was last updated on each server.

The extended attributes feature enables you to add a field to those TADDM recognizes. The Custom Server option enables you to run OS commands and scripts and populate them.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/tivoliaddm/Sensor+Examples

However, writing a script that extracts the data can be time consuming – this isn’t what we want to be doing. Populating the extended attributes is also a bit more complex than populating regular ones.

Fortunately, there are a number of shortcuts. The DeveloperWorks TADDM wiki has a sensor which will read a config file, create the extended attributes and populate them when TADDM discovers the relevant computer. All you need to do is enter the attribute name and the registry key (or WMI object, etc…) in the config file.

Extended Attributes Sensor and Tools

I used it today and when it runs, it’s a big timesaver.

However, I did have to tweak a few things for it to run on TADDM 7.2FP1 on Windows. In case this helps you, here is what I did:

• in the file ea_cli.bat, I changed the line
  @../support/bin/jython_coll.bat ea_cli.jy %*
  to
  @../support/bin/jython_coll.bat ea_cli.jy %*
  
• in the file sensorhelper.py, I changed the line
  from com.ibm.cdb.platform.ip import IpUtils
  to
  from com.ibm.cdb.platform.ip import IPv4Utils
  
• in the file ext_attr_db.py, I changed the line
  from com.ibm.cdb.topomgr.util import JdbcConnectionFactory
  to
  from com.collation.topomgr.util import JdbcConnectionFactory
  

Without the first change, nothing works. The second and third changes are because I got the error “ImportError: no module named ” when I ran the script.

Another useful sensor is this generic sensor.

-- Robert

Caesar’s Birthday

Today, July 13th, is the birthday of perhaps the most famous person who ever lived; Gaius Julius Caesar.

How many of us will be remembered for over 2,000 years?

http://www.oxforddnb.com/public/lotw/1.html (this week, might not work in the future)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar

 

-- Robert

Error 500: system#notboundexception

There are a number of reasons to encounter the Error 500: system#notboundexception message in your browser windows when you try to access a Maximo/TPAE/CCMDB/TSRM/EAM/etc system after a startup.

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21321771

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21320406

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21261539

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21305743

In general, the cause of the problem is that the application cannot connect to the database properly, for whatever reason.

I encountered the problem this week when I visited a customer’s test site. I could not login to the system, until I realized that I had been directed to an old server, which had it’s database tables truncated!

-- Robert