ALI Notification / Collab Problems: The Joys of IIS security
On my journey to get ALI Collab Notification working for us again, I came across this little gem: as far as I can tell, ALI Collab Notifications are broken out of the box when using IIS 6 (or 7) because of IIS’s infinite security wisdom.
I just couldn’t get Collab Notification working, so I fired up PTSpy and saw this (“Unable to retrieve the template named ‘/plumtree/collab/templates/NotifyLinkNotificationText.nst’”):
Through a long and arduous process (more on how in my next post), I found this out:
The 6.5 Notification server uses the image server to store notification templates in bea\alui\ptimages\imageserver\plumtree\collab\templates. (You remember notification templates, right?)
This is interesting; ALI has really gone in the direction of making everything “remote” (remember, Adaptive Layouts are remote so they’re easy to edit and access in a central location).
But if you’re using IIS as an image server, you’re in trouble. Hit the link to find out why!
The problem at its core is that unlike most web servers, IIS 6 (and 7) don’t serve files with extensions that don’t have recognized MIME types in the OS (or IIS metabase). So all your fancy “.nst” and “.inc” collab notification template files on the image server? Useless! IIS will simply return a 404 when you try to load the template with a browser (or, in this case, when Notification Server tries to load the template).
This wonderful security feature is described by Microsoft here, here, and here. In a nutshell, you have to add .nst and .inc as known MIME types to IIS.
To do this, you open IIS Manager, right-click on the local computer name, and go to properties. Then click the “MIME Types” button and use the “New” button in the popup to register “.nst” and “.inc” as “application/ms-octet-stream”.
Once you do this, Notification Server will be able to load those templates, and you should start getting notifications (I haven’t yet, but that’s yet another post for the ALI Security and Directory Service. *sigh*).
By the way, to test whether your IIS instance needs this patch, use the following link: http://portal_server/imageserver/plumtree/collab/templates/NotifyLinkNotification.nst. If you get a 404, you need to make the changes shown above.
UPDATE: I was whining about this little flaw to a good friend of mine, an Oracle Consultant extraordinaire, and he both complained that I never give him a shout-out on this blog (yeah, he doesn’t blog himself), and pointed out that if I had just RTFM, I’d have seen this in there. So, let’s kill two birds with one stone: Omid Krabbe, thanks for your tip: don’t do any install/upgrade without reading the documentation, no matter how many times you’ve done ‘em with previous versions!
