Installing SmartCloud Control Desk 7.5.1 Demo Content on ICD 7.6

You can't do it

Use the maxdemo data that comes with the product. Install it initially using these steps:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/wikis/home?lang=en#!/wiki/Anything%20about%20Tivoli/page/How%20to%20install%20the%20sample%20data%20during%20IBM%20Control%20Desk%207.6%20installation


These steps are supposed to get it installed after the initial install, but I tried twice and failed both times:

http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSLKT6_7.6.0/com.ibm.mam.inswas.doc/mam_install/t_mam_create_maxdemo_postinstall.html

So if you want demo data, which you do in some number of test/dev environments, simply install it at initial install time. It goes very smoothly.

But you can, mainly, with a little work

UPDATE 8/17/2016 

NOTE:THIS WILL ACTUALLY MAKE YOUR SELF SERVICE CENTER UNUSABLE!!!! I don't know why, but it does. Something in the content makes it so that you cannot do anything from the Self Service Center. So ONLY install this data if you have a complete backup of your system (VM snapshots are a wonderful thing).

Additionally, you will have other problems, such as the following error when you try to create a new WORKORDER:
BMXAA4169E - No record found in maxvars table for maxvar WOENABLEREPFAC. Make sure to insert the MAXVAR in the MAXVARS table.

And there's no easy fix. So the demo data will let you play around with a lot of functionality, but the system is pretty unusable for anything else after you install it.

Add an attribute to the TICKET table

You need to add an attribute named RBA_RC to the TICKET table. Its type needs to be ALN and its length set to 50. This attribute no longer exists, but the demo content requires it. You may want to take a different route to solve this problem, but this was the easiest one I could think of.

Remember, after adding this attribute, you need to set Admin Mode to ON, Apply Configuration Changes, then set Admin Mode to OFF.

Download the package

First, you need to download the content pack ZIP file itself from here:

https://www-304.ibm.com/software/brandcatalog/ismlibrary/details?catalog.label=1TW10CO0A

Edit the package

You've got the entire package downloaded, but if you just try to install it, you will fail. So you need to edit the file named Package/ImportPackage.xml within the zip file. You can edit it in vi, Notepad, gedit, etc. - any text editor you want. What you need to do is delete lines 408 through 717 (leaving the last line that reads "</package>"). The reason for this is that the first error when importing was on line 408. I tried de-selecting different options through the GUI, but was not successful. My choice to simply delete these lines was made only after 40-50 other attempts.

After editing the file, add it pack to the zip file.

Define your local content and Install

1. Create an XML file called ContentSource.xml in the C:\temp directory on your Smartcloud Control Desk server system that contains the following text:
   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <catalog infourl="" lastModified="" owner=""
     xmlns:tns="http://www.ibm.com/tivoli/tpae/ContentCatalog"
     xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="ContentCatalog.xsd">
     <catalogItem>
       <version>7.5.1</version>
       <type>mriu</type>
       <name>Enter the name of package</name>
       <description>Enter a description of the package here</description>
       <homepage/>
       <licenseurl/>
       <category>Describe the category of the content</category>
       <url>file:////C:\temp\TestPackage.zip</url>
     </catalogItem>
   </catalog>
2. Edit the name and description and the category according to the content that you are installing. Change the file name in the URL to the name of the content pack zip file.
3. Save the file.
4. Copy the content pack zip file to the C:\temp directory on the server.
5. Go to the ISM Content Installer application: System Configuration>IBM Content Installer.
6. Click the New icon.
7. Enter the location of the ContentSource.xml that you created in step 1 and a description. The file name in our example is:  file:////c:\temp\ContentSource.xml
8. Click Save.
9. Click the newly created content source.
10. Click the download link to install the content.

You've now got a good amount of demo content

You don't have everything from the original content pack, but you've got a lot more than you started with. Good luck.

IBM Control Desk for Service Providers

One of the many features of IBM Control Desk that separates it from the competition is its ability to support Service Providers. It does this by allowing you to secure information on a per-customer basis. For this blog post, I wanted to show a couple of multi-customer scenarios in the product. Specifically, I wanted to show a customer-specific user logging in and only seeing that customer's assets. Additionally, I wanted to show a software license being assigned to that customer-owned asset and how it appears. The screenshots associated with those are shown here:

Create a customer named ACME CORP

Now create a Person who is associated with ACME CORP.

The Cust/Vendor field is farther down on the page.

Now create a user that is associated with that Person.

Now create a Security Group (SP) with any permissions you want, but specify "Authorize Group for Customer on User's Person record". I only granted Read access to the Assets application. And add your user to this group.

Here I'm logged in as the user, and can only see the one asset associated with ACME CORP.

Here I'm viewing the Licenses (SP) application for Adobe Acrobat and see that a license has been allocated to ITAM1010, which is the asset associated with ACME CORP.

Configuring ITIC for use with IBM Control Desk 7.6

As shipped with ICD 7.6 (at least on Linux x86 64-bit), ITIC isn't quite configured correctly. When you try to run startFusion.sh, it will complain that it cannot file the main class. The problem lies in the init.sh script. Specifically, you need to change the following line:

FSNBUILD=7510

to

FSNBUILD=7600

Without this change, it's trying to find a file named IntegrationComposer7510.jar, which doesn't exist. In 7.6, the correct file is IntegrationComposer7600.jar.

Another thing to note is the URL of the BigFix server for use with the ITIC mapping is:

https://hostname-or-ipaddress:52311

The easiest way to work around the problem of having one VM on a NAT network and one on a host-only network in VMWare Workstation

The Situation

I have a BigFix environment with a Windows BigFix server on the host-only network, and I've got IBM Control Desk installed on a Red Hat VM on one of the NAT networks. I want to integrate the two for asset management, which requires the Integration Composer, which has to communicate with both servers simultaneously. (We've done an air-gapped integration for a couple of customers, but I wanted to use the out-of-the-box mechanism).

Bad Solutions

Some of the solutions that I considered, but threw out because of the work involved:

Change an IP address

Simply move one server to the other network and then add routes to communicate between different subnets IP addresses on the same network

Easy Solution

I added a network card on the NAT network to the BigFix Windows server. VMWare Workstation quickly suspended and resumed the VM, the adapter was seen, and it got a DHCP address on the NAT network. And then I could communicate between the two machines!

Installing IBM Control Desk v7.6 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6

I just had a difficult time installing ICD 7.6 on RHEL 6.6 and wanted to share one workaround that I used that finally got me around the prerequisite checker failures on Installation Manager.

I've done this successfully in a production environment, but in this case I'm installing this in a VM in my lab that's running under VMWare Workstation, and it's on a NAT network. Every time the Installation Manager runs the prerequisite checker, I kept getting a failure on network.fqdn, even though the hostname was absolutely set to a fully qualified domain name (icd76.mynet.foo). So I started up 'dnsmasq' locally and pointed to my own IP address as my DNS server. That allowed network.fqdn to PASS, but then network.dns would FAIL (!).

Figuring I have my networking configured "good enough" for my small test machine, I simply edited the following files:

PAD_07060000.cfg
PAW_07060000.cfg

in the directory /var/ibm/InstallationManager/bundles/plugins/com.ibm.tivoli.pae.prereq 1.0.1.20157141414/com/ibm/tivoli/pae/prereq/SystemRequirements/unix/ to change:

network.dns=True

to

network.dns=False

And then it worked like a champ!

How did you find those buried files?

If you cd to /var/ibm/InstallationManager/logs and run 'firefox index.xml', you get a great view of all of the Installation Manager log files. In the latest one, the completion message pointed me basically to that directory.

IBM's Maximo 7.6 demo site is available

It's here:

http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21697301

It's just Maximo (enterprise) Asset Management, so it doesn't have any of the IBM Control Desk-specific content, but is a good place to check stuff out if you don't have a a local installation running.

How to Convert Remedy Time to UTC TimeStamp

This question came up on the INUG-USERS mailing list the other day, and our own IV Blankenship was the person who came to the rescue:

Question:
Using Impact WebService we capture the Ticket Close time from Remedy.

I observer Remedy sends the datetime in the below format. How to convert
the below format to NetCool UTC datetime format and display in NetCool
Dashboard.

*2016-02-23T20:45:09-08:00 -> with timezone embedded*


Answer:
The Impact ParseDate function is a wrapper for the Java SimpleDateFormat
class (
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html)

The problem with your date string is the timezone. SDF and ParseDate by
extension expect it to be (+-)NNNN not (+/-)NN:NN.
Also, you have to escape the T using single quotes.


You did not say if you were using IPL or Javascript, but here is some IPL
that will work and verify that your data is in the expected format.

d="2016-02-23T20:45:09-08:00";
if(d like '(\d\d\d\d\-\d\d\-\d\dT\d\d:\d\d:\d\d)([\+\-]\d\d):(\d\d)$') {
  parts=RExtractAll(d,
'(\d\d\d\d\-\d\d\-\d\dT\d\d:\d\d:\d\d)([\+\-]\d\d):(\d\d)$');
  tempDateString=parts[0]+parts[1]+parts[2];
  Log(0,tempDateString);
  f="yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZ";
  pd=ParseDate(tempDateString, f, null);
  Log(pd);
}
else {
  Log(0,"Unsupported date format!");
}