PINK17 Feb 19-22, Las Vegas

I'm attending the Pink Elephant 2017 IT Service Management Conference and Exhibition Feb 19-22 in Las Vegas. To all of my associates and friends, please let me know if you're going so we can try to connect.

IBM's Cloud Business Partner Advisory Council in New Orleans was amazing

This was the first BPAC I've attended, and I hope to be invited to many more. We got to get to know our VP enablement team and have some great fellowship all around. I got to make new friends at Lighthouse, gen-E, Flagship, Perficient, ne Digital, Sirius, Avnet, Arrow and others. Thank you Dave Hock, Bob Miller, Joh Donaldson, Don Stough, Rene Ferguson, Melissa Hadley and all other IBMers involved for pulling off a great event.

If you're an IBM Business Partner, you need to make sure to keep in touch with the IBM BP team. There was great information presented and just an outstanding sharing of ideas to help everyone be successful.

We look forward to seeing everyone in March in Vegas at InterConnect if not before!

Cloning Maximo 7.6

Richard Lesses has created a great article on cloning Maximo 7.6 here:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/a9ba1efe-b731-4317-9724-a181d6155e3a/entry/Cloning_Maximo_7_6?lang=en

In the comments you'll also find a link to this MSSQL script that Brian Baird uses to update several values after cloning:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/a9ba1efe-b731-4317-9724-a181d6155e3a/entry/Cloning_Maximo_7_6?lang=en

All of the applications included in IBM Control Desk for Service Providers 7.6 and 7.6.0.1

Just thought this would be useful information to publish. Screenshots of all of the Applications you can select from the "Go To" menu and submenus in ICD 7.6 and 7.6.0.1

Adding an additional hostname to Maximo on WebSphere and IBM HTTP Server

When you install Maximo (IBM Control Desk in this case) on IBM HTTP Server and WebSphere, the installation creates all of the virtual hosts you need based on the hostname of the IBM HTTP Server(s) that you include in your environment. However, you may need users to access the application using a different hostname (maybe one that's accessible from the Internet, for example). If you simply add a DNS CNAME record for your web server, you'll get an error when you try to access the application with that hostname.

To fix this problem, you need to add a Host Alias to each of the appropriate Virtual Hosts that you have defined for Maximo, then restart the application server(s). Here's how:

1. In my environment, I want to be able to access Maximo using the URL:

http://icdcommon/maximo

The two servers participating in my cluster are named icd1 and icd2. I'm adding an entry in my /etc/hosts (or \windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts) file for icdcommon to be an alias for icd1.

(In a real environment, you would be modifying DNS appropriately).

2. Log into the WebSphere admin console at http://dmgr_host:9060/admin

3. Navigate to Environment->Virtual Hosts, where you will see multiple virtual hosts. I have the application configured in a cluster named MXCLUSTER, so the virtual hosts of interest to me are:

MXCLUSTER_host
default_host
webserver1_host

4. For each of the above Virtual Hosts, click on that host then click the Host aliases link.

5. Click the New button to add a new entry and in that entry, specify:

Host Name: icdcommon
Port: 80

6. Click OK, then click the save link at the top of the page (or you can wait until your done to click save).

7. Once you've done the above for each of the three Virtual Hosts, you need to restart all IBM HTTP Servers AND all application servers.

8. Now you should be able to access the application with http://icdcommon/maximo (you may need to restart your browser).

Installing IBM Control Desk 7.6 on RHEL 6.5 in a test environment

The biggest hitch you'll encounter when installing ICD 7.6 on Redhat Linux in a dev/test environment is the error

CTGIN8264E : Hostname failure : System hostname is not fully qualified

And the reason it's a big hitch is because the error is misleading. You do need to have your hostname set to your FQDN, but you also need to have an actual DNS (not just /etc/hosts, but true DNS) A record for your hostname. If you don't already have one that you can update, you can install the package named:

The Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) DNS (Domain Name System) server

It is available on the base Redhat install DVD.

Accessing the CTGINST1 DB2 Instance From the Command Line Processor

When you install IBM Control Desk 7.6 on Windows, you actually have two DB2 instances created - DB2 and CTGINST1. The one with all of the data is CTGINST1, but the one that the system is configured to access is DB2. Luckily, this is easy to fix by changing the environment variable named DB2INSTANCE. After install, it is set to "DB2", and you simply need to change its value to "CTGINST1". You can do this temporarily from the command line or permanently by modifying the environment variables for the user.