BMC Remedy rapid release

BMC has kind of started a rapid release schedule for AR System/Atrium/ITSM/SmartIT. That means that some parts will get new releases every 3 months and some parts every 6 month. This is great, to see fixes and quality improvements. But I can not really see anybody running a full ITSM/SmartIT stack to be able to upgrade at this speed.

Anyway, as of 4th of September 2018 18.08 is out. And the parts of 18.05 that was not generally available was made available. 18.05 contains some big changes which need some thought before you move forward.

BMC is trying to move all parts into this new version schema. So all products in AR System/Atrium/ITSM/SmartIT should have the same version number. The version number is YY.MM of the release. But so far AR System/Atrium/ITSM is called with the old version numbers, which in 18.05 is 9.1.05. So still not fully in sync. But the documentation is using the new version numbers. 18.05 already have a bunch of patches.

From 9.1.05 the old RPC based ARAPI used from C is officially out of support and not updated. So the changes in AR System that is in 9.1.05 is only supported in the Java version of ARAPI. One of those changes is menu type to get license info that is needed in the new license management.

Other new things is a console to more easy access configuration and status of a server group. And more or less even a standalone server is treated as a server group. The biggest problem at the moment with the server group config is that some of the config is in raw database tables that you can only access with database tools if you need to fix something. And you will need to fix something for sure.

The file deployment is now the way to patch the system. And in 9.1.05 there are new enhancement to work better for CMDB and ITSM. One of the most important thing about file deployment is that you have to have the file deployment service running on all servers. And you have to make sure the AR System Monitor form contains all the servers with correct info, and only the correct servers. Of curse to make this work you have to have firewalls open so the server doing the deploy can access all the servers.

SmartIT/MyIT/Digital workplace is now more separate, and your URLs will change. But still on same server. MongoDB is gone. And there is probably more things that I am missing. But this is my first take on this.

New web and new release for php-arapi

Finally some activity on php-arapi. The web has been rewritten. More information about how to compile, and how to use. But it is still quite thin. Hope more will come soon.

Code update include better support to compile for arapi 6.3/7.0/7.1. But RTL, which is used to access arapi, still miss some features wanted in 7.1. It does not handle the new selection field in 7.1. By not handle I mean it can not translate between value in database and the text seen by the user in the application.

I've supplied some patch to RTL, but the project seem dead. No activity. And there is more code needed in RTL to handle arapi 7.1 and 7.5. I guess the feature for php-arapi is to rewrite without use of RTL.

The new binaries you can download is for arapi 7.1 and php 5.2.x, at least up to 5.2.10. php 5.3.x is not supported at the moment. It might very well compile and work fine. But there are some changes in 5.3.x related to extensions. And I guess I should look into what need/should be changed in php-arapi before I say php-arapi support php 5.3.x.

Patch 2 for AR System 7.5 released

I know, late again. It has been available for a few weeks already. Both server and mid-tier had quite a lot of fixes. I wonder how many bugs still there. Many of the fixes on the server were about memory leaks.

So today I finally installed a test server with 7.5 patch 2. It is Windows 2003 server with MS-SQL 2005 and IIS. I installed server, mid-tier, development and user on the server for testing. There was no problem with the installation. And I actually like the new java based installation. I just hope it can run in console mode on linux so you do not need to install X. Patch 007 for ITSM 7.0.003 did not want to run in console mode.

A quick check that everything was working showed that everything installed just fine. And I was surprised that import tool was change to something based on eclipse. That is nice, I hope. The old tool really sucked.

So now I just have to work with the thing to see what is new. I already know what is new in ARAPI. One thing is added parameters for error handling in active links, even if it is not there yet. And then also the dynamic joins query. I have to try that one.