Force users to connect through home cluster

IBM Lotus Sametime 7.5.1

Release Notes

Sametime, Sametime Gateway, Sametime Mobile

Force users to connect through home cluster

Sometimes, it is essential that users connect to their home server, for example, when using Facetime. In this case, to prevent the ability to connect to remote servers, forwarded log-ins should be rejected during the log-in process. This means that users should connect only to their home server.

This release note relates to both servers and clusters. Every user will be available to connect directly only to their home server/cluster. The log-in requests, which are forwarded from distributed (remote) servers/clusters will be rejected.

In order to force users to connect to a given server/cluster through a proxy or a list, this feature, configurable through sametime.ini, is available.

How to configure:

In the sametime.ini file, in the [Connectivity] section, the VPMX_TRUSTED_CLIENT_IPS setting should be set to a comma-separated list of trusted IP addresses. These addresses should be the proxy addresses.

An empty list (default) means the feature is turned off, and clients from all IP addresses can connect. Note that users should not be allowed to work directly on the proxy machine, or the limit is bypassed.

Sametime

Multiple Community considerations

The Sametime 7.5.x Connect client supports the ability to define multiple Sametime communities in an interface, and be logged into one or more of those communities at the same time. There are some important points to consider if you need to define more than one community or switch from one community to another:

zIf you have multiple communities in which some are 7.5.x communities and some are pre-7.5 communities, you should define your primary community (the main community defined first when the client is first run) as your most used 7.5.x community.

zSome features in 7.5.x work only with your primary community and require policies to be enabled for them, for example telephony. You will not be able to participate in telephony calls with users of a community that is not defined as your primary community.

zSelective 'Do Not Disturb' requires a 7.5.x server, and will only work with users from your primary community.

Sametime

New UNIX config values not always propagated by single restart

At a high level, configuration values on a Sametime server are provided to system components by a configuration servlet. The values provided by this servlet are stored in a cache to improve performance. When system components retrieve values, these values come from the cache.

If configuration changes are made directly to a data source, such as STConfig.nsf or sametime.ini, the server must be restarted. On Windows, as the server comes up, the config cache is refreshed from the config servlet before system components can retrieve values from the cache.

On UNIX, however, the order of component startup is more random than on Windows. As a result, it's possible that system components will retrieve configuration values from the cache before it gets refreshed. As a result, the refresh of the cache occurs after values have already been retrieved. If this happens, a second restart of the server will guarantee that system components retrieve the freshest configuration values.