So I just patched my ARSystem and wanted to share with everyone what issues I came across. Hopefully this will help someone else along the line. I started off with a system 7.1 patch 002 and wanted to apply the latest patch level at this time, patch 007.
System: ARS 7.1 Patch 002 ITSM 7.0.03 Patch 006 CMDB 2.1 Windows 2003 server SQL 2005 Database LDAP integration / SSO Patch order: Server.exe Approval.exe Assignment.exe Emaild.exe Midtier.exe After applying the patches I noticed a few issues: 1. Emails from the AR server were not going out to users. 2. Very long lag time (4-5 hrs) of assignment notification s to support personnel. 3. Request for approval notifications were not being generated. 4. Mid tier not working at all. 5. Users from other active directories not being created into People form. The first issue was caused by an incorrect Application Service Password. When our version of Remedy was first implemented, I was not involved (as is the case with many new Developers/Admins) and passwords were not made available to me. When you patch the Email Engine, the setup will ask you for the Application Service Password. If this password does not match what you currently have set, you will have to change it later in the user tool. Go to AR System Admin Console>System>General>Server Information>Connection Settings and change the password for Application Service Password to match what you set it to while applying the patch. Second issue, the lag time was caused by 2 things. The first culprit was because I was doing the patching at night time to minimize user downtime. Most escalations run at nighttime and, as explained by BMC Support, some patches create escalations that run to update forms/fields/values. If there are other escalations, these escalations will get in queue. Depending on how long escalations run for the queue will get rather large and can cause other escalations to fire very late. Since escalations are used for assignment and notifications, they could be delayed. The second culprit of the lag time that I noticed was because most of my testing was conducted by assigning INC and CHG tickets to a support group called "Remedy". I did not know that this support group had its own Business Hours set. To check for these do the following: Open form "Support Group"> look for the specific support group> go to Business hours and Holidays. Check if there are any business hours defined. These business hours, as the note on the tab says, "are used by the system (but not limited to) to determine notifications times, service level management actions, and time duration calculations". I simply deleted these hours to fix my issue. Third issue, request for approvals not being generated. This was an odd one and I couldn't figure it out. While looking on BMC Communities, I found an article that after patching you have to go into each approval notification and make a change to each notification then save it. This will update the filters needed for the notifications. To do this open the AP:Administration form (from the Home Page if you're an admin) go to the Notification tab, click in the tab to display all notifications. Open each individual notification, go to Administrative Information, under Change History enter a comment (this could be anything, I used "Patch 007"), then click save. This action updates the filters AP:Notify-000000000xxxx. After performing these steps the notifications for approval requests were working. Credit information: BMC Developer Network post # 81407 "Approval Notification message: don´t send after install Approval 7.1 P004". Solution provided by DavidR. Fourth Issue, Mid-Tier not working. This was caused by the mid tier patch overwriting the folder called "com" from location ARSystem\Mid-Tier\Web-INF. It is a good idea to backup this entire folder in case you need it later. The patch will create a backup for you, but just to be sure. Simply copy and paste this folder back to its location and restart the server. Fifth and last issue, our organization currently has 3 active directories (don't ask why). We have an LDAP integration which uses vendor forms to read each active directory and bring over, using escalations, user data. This data is used to create people in the CTM:People form. If a new user is created in active directory, the escalation picks it up and creates a user in Remedy. Because of the 3 active directories, our currently installation of the server is as follows: C:\Prog Files\AR System\Server. There are also 2 other folders setup as following: C:\Prog Files\AR System\Server-2 and C:\Prog Files\AR System\Server-3. This was done to accommodate 3 plugin.exe files. Each is used to access a different Active Directory. I guess you can say 3 plug-in servers are running. Well, the issue was that when I ran the Server.exe patch, it overwrote the armonitor.cfg file. This file contained the 3 different paths to each of the plug in servers. To fix the issue I had to open the armonitor.cfg file and add the lines: "C:\Program Files\AR System\server\arplugin.exe" -i "C:\Program Files\AR System\server-2" -m "C:\Program Files\AR System\server\arplugin.exe" -i "C:\Program Files\AR System\server-3" -m After adding these lines, you have to copy the file arplugin.exe from the original install directory to the other two locations (in my case the original was located in C:\Prog Files\AR System\Server). Then, restart the AR System Server 'service'. Then check your vendor forms and it works. Hopefully this will aid someone out there who is about to patch their ARSystem. I have yet to patch ITSM, from what I've read, it is a bit more complex. Marcelo Martinez _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Platinum Sponsor:rmisoluti...@verizon.net ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"
