When you edit the user’s properties this nasty error can appear if your Portal server is connected to an LDAP.

Error entering mail address into Self Care Portlet

Btw, this is a 6.1 or Portal.Next beta specific error, it should work fine on 6.0.

Here’s the full text of the error:

The reason this happens is that the portlet ( the self care portlet in this case)  is wired up to write the email address you entered in the form to a VMM attribute called ibm-primaryEmail . If your ldap schema doesn’t have a user attribute in it called ibm-primaryEmail , then you’re going to get an error when you try and write something to it.

Just to check it out, let’s look at the LDAP schema on this server (which is IBM Tivoli Directory Server 6.0)  . I’m using the awesome and free Apache Directory Studio to investigate the LDAP schema here.  Once the connection to the ldap is defined, go LDAP -> Open Schema Browser , and select the tab attribute types.

TDS ldap schema

Ok, so we have an attribute type ‘drink, favouriteDrink’ ;o) , but no ibm-primaryEmail . No matter, there is a ‘mail’ attribute there. We can make Portal use that to save email related attributes.

Open up wkplc.properties and find the section entitled LDAP Attribute Configuration (it’s near the bottom) . Here’s my completed one:

Cool, now run the task :

If you are using a federated ldap setup, edit the corresponding federated properties instead, and then run the following task:

. Restart the server and try the form again. It should correctly save the email attribute for the user and you can get on with sending email through Portal. Just for kicks, lets look at what that task did. It just edits the wimconfig file, which defines how VMM interacts . Open wimconfig.xml (wp_profile/config/cells/<cellname>/wim/config/wimconfig.xml) and search for ibm-primaryEmail.

Here is the part that does the mapping:

So the task is really just a (welcome) convenience, all it does it edit the xml file for you. Anyone who has tried to set up multirealms on 6.0 would be grateful for that!

For some reason Ubuntu, ships a shell called ‘dash’ as their default, rather than good old bash. (Well, they have their reasons.) This presents a problem for App Server, as all the scripts in AppServer/bin use #!/bin/sh (the Bourne shell) as their command interpreter, which on a Redhat machine is symlinked to /bin/bash . The reason why AppServer uses the Bourne shell is that it needs to work on AIX and Solaris too, and you can’t be sure that you have bash on one of those machines.

If you try to call wsadmin.sh on an Ubuntu system you get this error :

Now, when you’re installing Portal, it installs AppServer, and then calls the manageprofile.sh script to create the default profile for Portal “wp_profile” . Manageprofile.sh calls a bunch of ant scripts that needs to use wsadmin.sh (you can see where I’m going here….) . You might notice in AppServer/log/wp_profile_create.log messages like this :

It actually hangs for 20 minutes waiting for wsadmin to start!

So how do you fix it? Simply, before you install it, unlink /bin/sh -> /bin/dash , and relink so it reads /bin/sh -> /bin/bash

Carefully:

Now the install should run properly.