Author: Manisha Khond   Before you request certificate from the Certificate Authority, you have to generate Certificate Signing Request (CSR).   What is a CSR? A CSR or Certificate Signing request is a block of encoded text that is provided to a Certificate Authority when requesting an SSL Certificate. A CSR consists mainly of the public key of a key pair, and some additional information. Both of these components are inserted into the certificate when it is signed. What Information Is Included in a CSR? The CA will use the data from... [More]

We have had some customers ask about allowing the fg_sysadmin user account to have direct access to the /myfilegateway URI (MFG below) in order to upload and download files. This is my two cents worth on that subject.   Most people have seen or heard of Windows/Linux administrators who have two separate accounts on the machine that they administer. They use one account that has their full administrative privileges for doing things that only an administrator can and should do. However, a lot of what administrators do is more mundane work... [More]

Tags:  sfg fg_sysadmin myfilegateway

S1.1 Services and Adapter offered in IBM Sterling B2B Integrator (B2B in-short) can be configured to interact with various MQ servers. Here the list of servers and their versions supported as of B2B 5.2.6.3_5 iFix release. Some of these server connections can happen over SSL mode as described in the link above. In this article, I am going to cover steps involved to integrate B2B's JMS1.1 Client with ActiveMQ 5.14 server supporting 2-way SSL.   NOTE : I am using ActiveMQ 5.14 version here just for this demo. Please refer to... [More]

Tags:  activemq jms ssl kishore

Author: Manisha Khond   Inadequate security have led enterprise data breaches to increase at an alarming pace.Staggering numbers of affected customers (most recently EQUIFAX Data breach) incur financial losses and harm to the company reputation due to data breach. This send shock waves through the business world, creating a sense of urgency around identifying solutions. End-to-end encryption maximizes data protection regardless of whether the data is in a public or private cloud, on a device, or in transit. It can be invaluable in the... [More]

Looping is a common operation when processing data, but the nuts-and-bolts of configuring loops in Sterling B2B Integrator can mystify, especially if you've never created one. I believe the business of creating loops can be made easier if you keep several points in mind: Legislate   Add a rule that specifies when to stop looping. Evaluate   Place a  Sequence Start at the top of the loop to which we can return after each iteration.   Place a Choice activity after the Sequence Start to evaluate whether to continue looping.... [More]

Tags:  rule choice onfault loop sequence iterate

The following is a very simple routing channel template that will take any file that is received by a producers mailbox and route it to a consumer mailbox.  The filename stays the same from producers mailbox to consumers mailbox. First go to Routes>Templates then [+Create].   2. Give the template a name 'Blog_generic_static' and select 'Static'.   3. Go to tab 'Groups' skipping 'Special Characters'. Add the 'All Partners' group to both Producer and Consumer sides.   4. Go to tab... [More]

Business Process (BP) is core functionality of B2B and SFG suite. BPs are designed using BPML (resembles XML) and which often depends on XPATH expressions. I would like to capture some of commonly used XPATH functions/APIs here. That might help as a guide to users while developing BPs. Here is production documentation that introduces Business Processes and XPATH - Click here XPATH Tutorial at w3schools - https://www.w3schools.com/xml/xpath_intro.asp   Most of the XPATH APIs are self explanatory. So I am not providing description... [More]

Tags:  b2b bpml sterling kishore xpath

Author: Manisha Khond   SSL Certificate have a set expiry date and upon the expiry, certificate becomes unusable. The expired certificate can not be used in the web application, in the Adapters/Services. The TLS communication with expired certificates would fail. The use of an expired certificate causes communication loss, sales loss, trust withdrawal, damage to the brand reputation etc. One may ask, how do I check the certificate expiry? The certificates used by IBM Sterling B2B Integrator and IBM Sterling File Gateway are stored in... [More]

You may see the following error: 450 TLS session of data connection has not resumed or the session does not match the control connection   Currently, SSL/TLS session resumption / reuse is not supported that Sterling B2B Integrator 5.2.6+ build as the client connecting to the remote FTP server.   In short, from our research, here is our L3 team's... [More]

This has come up multiple times in the past month, so I think it is time to address this here. We have a lot of IBM Sterling File Gateway (SFG) customers who are lacking a certain best practice that is related to deleting SFG partners and administrative accounts (meaning the accounts of company internal SFG architects, operators, route provisioners or SFG sys_admins) who have transferred to another job or left the company. I will refer to all the company internal administrative SFG users as "CIUs" in the rest of this blog entry. The... [More]

Here is a real-world issue that crossed my desk recently:  our client received inbound files from trading partners in which each file record needed be exactly 512 characters in length. If a record contained fewer than 512 characters, the record needed to be padded with spaces. One trading partner sometimes sent records shorter than the required length, so the customer needed a means of ensuring that all records were compliant.  I thought about this issue and suggested the following code, which is deployed within a Java Task Service:... [More]

Tags:  spaces pad java barrie fixed-length records

The difference between the 4 sftp (SSH) keys in IBM Sterling B2B Integrator (SBI). Known Host Key User Identity Key Authorized User Key SSH Host Identity Key The easiest way to understand the keys is that you have 2 keys that Identify your partner, and 2 that Identify you. The 2 keys that identify your partner:  Known Host Key   &   Authorized User Key , are given to you, or you reach out and grab them with a utility in SBI, however, in either case you normally do not create them. The 2 keys that Identify you : User Identity... [More]

When using a Broadcast Routing Channel Template it is possible for one route to fail and others to succeed.  This blog will show you how to Redeliver the failed route(s).   The following screen shots are of a Broadcast Route that has failed to deliver a file to a consumer.  As you will see 2 other Routes were successful. **NOTE: if Redeliver is initiated from the following screen all Broadcast Consumers will receive the file again** :   The following screen shows you that if you highlight the failed route, 2 additional tabs... [More]

  This article talks about Remote CLA2 in cluster environment set up and configurations with SSL  Basic remote CLA2 with SI cluster high level diagram:                                            1. Install Command Line Adapter 2 in two remote servers by extracting respective CLA2RemotePackage.jar file from SBI node1 and node2    2. Make the required setup for Command Line Adapter 2, and note down... [More]