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

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.

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:

1. SLM 7.6 is definitely installed
2. 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.

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

Here’s the original ARS List post I put out:

Fortunately this issue SHOULD be very straight forward.

Unfortunately – it isn’t.

There’s a button that calculates a person’s period of eligibility to make changes to their HR benefits, etc.  You enter their employment anniversary date and hit the button and this performs a calculation:

$My Date$ – 864000 (i.e., minus 10 days).

Here’s the interesting thing – when the date entered is  Daylight savings time – 3/15 this spring – the calculated value for the date time field returns 3/4/2010 11:00:00 PM.  Normally all of the times in this date/time field are left at 12:00:00 AM and are unused.

Technically speaking the calculation is EXACTLY correct.  3/4/2010 11:00:00 PM is exactly 10 days before 3/15/2010 12:00:00 AM – because 3/15 has an “extra” hour added that is a figment of our collective imagination.  Technically DST doesn’t happen until 2:00 AM though but that’s a matter for another time.

I was thinking about changing the times on these to default to 3:00:00 AM instead of 12:00:00 AM – but I’m open to suggestions.

As it turns out the solution was really simple – the original math for the “Set Fields” calculation did this:

$My Date$ – 864000

I just switched it to use the Remedy DATEADD function and added negative 10 days – this only evaluates the “date” portion of the value and ignores DST:

DATEADD(“day”,-10,$My Date$)

Thanks to C.B. on the arlist for the suggestion.

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

‘Twas the night before Christmas,

And I – mop in hand –

Had just started in

Cleaning porcelain tile-land

The kitchen, the hall, the mud room too

Also the foyer, there was much to do.

I swept then I mopped, and did it up quick –

So it would dry long before St. Nick

When out in the entrance I heard yell and a thud

I dropped all my stuff and thought “aw….CRUD”

And there on the floor lying perfectly still

Was that jolly old elf, a total fresh kill

The tracks told the story and told it quite well

First the chimney, then the tile, then a long slip and he fell.

I stood a long moment, trying to be shrewd.

Was this illegal? Was there a treaty? Was I really screwed?

And then the answer came in a flash – and I ran

to the basement, to find the Halloween stash

With my pirate costume on, I bowed and I begged

“Please FSM – please save the day”

Out on the lawn I heard a loud BOOM

I sprang to the stoop and looked out from the room

“On cavatappi, on spaghetti, al Dente, of course!”

“We have a true pirate to save from the courts!”

His noodly appendage struck out, and raised that old elf

Who stood, looked at FSM, and shook off his own self.

The two had a moment there alone in the snow -

Two imaginary characters respectfully saying Hello

And ever since that day all I get is some coal.

A while back I wrote a long series on how to process incoming emails into Remedy Incident Management.

I received a number of positive responses to that as well as a lot of questions.  One of the frequent questions was “How do we put attachments in?”.

Robert Fults of Florida International University was nice enough to provide a complete guide on how to do this.  The material below this paragraph was all provided by him.  Thanks Robert!

Getting your incoming email to accept a single attachment

First, add a new tab to the page holder called Attachments.

Remedy email attachment (click for full size)

You will need a Character field to store the Email GUID and temp field to store the Attachment Unique ID or Attachment ID (I used the unique ID).  You also need a place to store those attachments so we add an attachment pool.  NOTE: I added an attachment table for further enhancement (I am planning to do a table loop to get the Attachment IDs of multiple attachments, which will change the way this works to some extent.)

Now we can start putting together some workflow.  First, we need to get the Email GUID from the AR System Messages form.  Remember that filter we created to get all the data pushed to our staging form? Just add this field to the list.  Mine has Email GUID = $Unique Identifier$. Done.

Now we create a filter that fires on submit to our staging form, in my case IncomingEmailProcessing, which will get the attachment to the staging form. It has two Set Fields actions.  The first will get the Attachement ID from the AR System Email Attachment join form.

Remedy Filter action 1 (click for full size)

The next Set Fields action will take the attachment ID and search the AR System Email Attachments form and get the attachment.

Remedy filter action 2 (click for full size)

At this point your processing form should be collecting an email attachment. Now, how do we get it to the ticket?  First we need to make a correction: if you are using AR System 7.1, you need to modify filter HPD:HIJ:ModifyIncident_210_CreateWorklog to push z2AF Work Log01 = $SRAttachment (or whatever you name the attachment fields if you add more, point is that you need to push the attachment field).

Now we can go back to the filter we use to create new tickets from the data on our staging form, in my case +HPD:IncomingEmailCreateNewIncident, and add some new fields to it.

z2AF_Act_Attachment_1 = $attachment field1$

z1D_WorklogDetails="Incident submitted via Email" (or whatever you like, it need to contain something)

z1D_View_Access=Internal or Public (your choice)

z1D_CommunicationSource=Email (for clarity)

z1D_Activity_Type=Customer Communication (for clarity)

 And that takes care of New Incident requests. Now for incident updates.  Go to the filter where you processed updates, in my case +HPD:IncomingEmailModifyIncident, and add the attachment fields.

SRAttachment=$attachment field1$

 That’s it.  If you know how to use table loops you can copy the attachment table from the AR System Email Messages form and change the qualification to ( ‘Source ID2′ = $EmailGUID$) AND ( ‘Type’ = “Email”) which will populate it the table with the relevant attachments.  From there you change your work flow to walk the table and get the attachment IDs and attachments one at a time.  Then you could push them all at once to the appropriate places assuming you have added the necessary attachment fields to the attachment pool.

-Robert Fults

rfults@fiu.edu

Remedy Developer @ FIU 

I had posted a question on the ARSList about how to properly format the C API call for “OpenForm” – we were getting errors using it.

Mark Worley – a fellow poster – was kind enough to send me this example which worked and allowed us to fix the problem

Dim arSession as ARUSER.COMAppObj
Dim arForm as ARUSER.ICOMFormWnd
Dim arField as ARUSER.ICOMField
Dim sessionNumber as Long

Set arSession = New ARUSER.COMAppObj
sessionNumber = arSession.Login(“ARUserID”, “ARUserPassword”,False)

arSession.OpenForm sessionNumber, “ARServer”, “Form Name”, ARSubmit , 1
Set arForm = arSession.GetActiveForm
Set arField = arForm.GetFieldById(999999999)
arField.Value = “Value”
arForm.Submit

I am on Facebook from time to time but I haven’t gotten into any of the really popular games.  From a marketing/innovation standpoint though I do find them amazing – the number of people who are joining Cafe World (Mafia Wars, etc) is astronomical.  Last I heard it was 500,000+ a DAY joining.

It’s already one of the most successful Facebook apps ever launched.

In any case – some guy is selling a Cafe World Secrets guide on Clickbank available here if that’s your thing (Disclaimer: Affiliate link, etc etc).

B.