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]

In this blog I am posting step by step details with screenshots which helps to understand how partial files are handled by IBM Sterling B2b Integrator i,e what is a real partial file , what it does with partial files and what to expect .   Testing Prerequisites : I have created the below resources for testing purpose 1. Created a simple SFTP server adapter which uses remote perimeter server. Enabled Resumption through Radio Button "Limited (resume of file transfers)" in Adapter config  + sftp.listStagedDocuments=True in... [More]

Tags:  partialfile partial files sbi

Searching though a table in a SQL Server database, I found the date field I was looking for.  To my dismay, the field's value was a string in Unix epoch time - a value representing the number of seconds since January 1, 1970. I decided to convert the string to a date/time format that I was more used to seeing.  After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I found the format I needed. Let's explore this step by step: The original query consisted of: SELECT FNAME, LNAME, JOIN_DATE FROM MEMBERS WHERE FNAME = 'SUE' AND LNAME... [More]

Tags:  server string barrie time sql epoch convert unix date/time

In a Dynamic RCT, the consumer to which the message has to be delivered can be identified either using facts or using a Business Process(BP). This blog will provide information on how a consumer can be identified using a BP.   Set up   1. Configure 2 partners,one as a producer and another as a consumer. Assign them to the respective groups as shown below.                                               2. As BP plays the... [More]

A few months ago, I had a tricky AS2 issue that was rather difficult to diagnose due to the junction of different settings. A customer had just installed 5020603 and was testing prior to going into production. They were planning to migrate off of a non-IBM AS2 product, but were using it to act as the client to send AS2 data to SB2BI for their testing prior to the migration. Every attempt to send AS2 data to SB2BI failed with an error. There were a few of things that together caused the problem. I am going to explain those and mention some best... [More]

Tags:  setup as2 settings

In 2017, a number of companies announced they would no longer support SHA-1 signing.  What’s behind this change, and what does it mean for Sterling B2B Integrator users?   First of all, let me give an overview of signing .  Signing is the process of applying a cryptographic hash function to data, to generate a string of characters, which can then be used to guarantee the data is intact.  The sender uses a private certificate to generate the signing string, then the receiver uses the public key of that certificate to... [More]

Sterling B2B Integrator users have been told in recent years that they should be using TLS security instead of SSL security.  Sometimes they are handed a mandate by their own company to use TLS, and sometimes they are being told by their partners that SSL is no longer acceptable.  I’d like to take a little time to discuss what this means, and why the change is being made.   First of all, a little about the terminology.  SSL and TLS describe the handshaking methods used to establish an HTTPS connection or an FTPS... [More]

Tags:  ssl ftps tls https

This blog is part of a series in which I am conducting swimming lessons to help Sterling B2B Integrator users to make use of the sea of information that is stored in some of our logs.   Let’s talk about the logs that are used for FTP.  This protocol is one of the oldest ways in the computer industry for transferring data between two systems.  It has dozens of command options, and several places where different types of data are specified.  For example, the type option itself has two common parameters, ASCII or type A,... [More]