Re-reading the ar.conf (ar.cfg) file
Re-read the ar.conf file on a BMC AR Server Manually:
I have used this before but I had to look it up again…
Let’s say you make a manual change to the ar.conf file on the server and you don’t want to restart the server (some changes do require a restart, check the docs)
You can force the server to re-read the ar.conf file like this:
/bin/arsignald -c
So, for Remedy 7.6.03 (or nearly any other) server (as the appropriate user):
/<install dir>/ar/bin/arsignald -c ServerName Port
e.g.:
/remedy/ar/bin/arsignald -c myserver 2100
Converting Remedy/Unix Epoch Date to Dates and/or Times in Excel
Convert Epoch Date/Times in Excel
One of the more annoying things that people run into when dealing with data directly from the Remedy database is conversion of date/time strings.
Remedy – and most unix systems – uses Epoch date. This is simply the number of seconds since January 1st 1970.
To most people this is meaningless of course – however, if you are exporting the data and pulling it into Excel it’s easy to convert it to a date or time (or both).
Imagine you have exported the data and opened it in Excel – you will have a column of integers. Let’s say that is in A1.
If you want the time only you would put this formula into B1:
=TIME(HOUR(A1),MINUTE(A1),SECOND(A1))
To get the date you do something very similar – enter this formula:
=date(year(a2),month(a2),day(a2))
That’s it – email me with questions.
Where is BMC_SLM_HOME?
If you’ve attempted to install BMC Remedy 7.6 patch 001 for Linux you probably noticed the installer fails immediately.
The error message it gives is straight forward:
“No BMC Service Level Management products needing this patch were found on this system”.
That’s all well and good, except for two things:
- SLM 7.6 is definitely installed
- The installer didn’t prompt you for anything at this point except the license agreement – it doesn’t even ask you if you want to browse for the location of the application
Here’s a screenshot of it:
Checking on this further I re-read the patch install notes and found this embedded in them on page 3:
You must check your environment variables to see if BMC_SLM_HOME is present
before running ./setup.bin on UNIX.
Here’s the problem – there’s apparently nowhere in the universe that tells you WHAT the BMC_SLM_HOME environment variable is supposed to be set TO.
Google had never heard of it.
BMC Support was not immediately familiar with it – searching their KB’s – and ever PDF I have downloaded from them – resulted in zero results.
Fortunately this is an easy problem to solve. This is one of those rare cases where the “HOME” is actually something logical – aka the install directory.
To fix the problem I just had to add this to the environment variable to the .profile for the user and then re-run the installer. You could just do this command line as well:
BMC_SLM_HOME=/<my app install dir>/apps/ServiceLevelManagement
export BMC_SLM_HOME
Voila – problem fixed.
What is the “SYS:Application Status Enabler” form for?
SYS:Application Status Enabler in ITSM 7.03
I was troubleshooting a performance problem with ITSM 7.03 and ran into errors in the arerror.log file referring to this form. There were about 100,000 old records in this form that weren’t doing anything useful as far as I could tell – it looked like old trash data.
I wasn’t familiar with it – and I hadn’t bugged BMC for a while – so I shot a note to their tech support.
This is what they said:
The SYS:Application Status Enabler form is a system form used to enable child records after a parent record has been created.
For example, when creating an Incident and I also create a relationship record and a Work Info record. These child records are created with a Status of “Delete”. When a child record is created it also creates a record in the SYS:Application Status Enabler form. In this case there are two records created in the SYS:Application Status Enabler form, one for the relationship record and the other for Work Info.
Upon saving the Incident it updates it corresponding records to the SYS:Application Status Enabler form which in turn runs workflow that updates the Status on the child records from a “Delete” state to and “Enabled” state.
After this operation is done there is workflow in place to delete the records. If you have old records in that form then there is no problem with purging them, since they are no longer serving any function.
So now you know 
Remedy Email Engine SSL Error
SSL Errors
We had the email engine working fine for quite some time (ARS 7.1 on Solaris).
Then – one magical day after server patching – it quit. The error messages reported in the email error logs form said this:
Connect failed
javax.mail.MessagingException: Connect failed;
nested exception is:
javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: sun.security.validator.ValidatorException: PKIX path building failed: sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilderException: unable to find valid certification path to requested target
at com.sun.mail.pop3.POP3Store.protocolConnect(POP3Store.java:148)
at javax.mail.Service.connect(Service.java:275)
at javax.mail.Service.connect(Service.java:156)
at com.bmc.arsys.emaildaemon.ReceiverModule.initializeIncommingMailbox(ReceiverModule.java:1876)
at com.bmc.arsys.emaildaemon.ReceiverModule.doWork(ReceiverModule.java:216)
at com.bmc.arsys.emaildaemon.ThreadBase.run(ThreadBase.java:288)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:595)
….and it looked like this…
Remedy Email Engine SSL Error
As it turned out – it was a pretty easy fix.
For some reason the patching (OS level patching by another group) had overwritten our CACERTS file. We didn’t notice immediately because the replacement file had approximately the right size and date.
So – if you run into the “PKIX path building failed: unable to find valid certification path to requested” error – re-import or otherwise replace your SSL certificates.
-William