WebSphere Plugin Key & Password Expiration 4/26

Accelerated Value Announcement:  WAS Alert affecting ICS Products !

WebSphere Plugin Key & Password Expiration 4/26

Overview:    WAS Support posted two Flash Alerts to customers about Expirations on 4/26.  These expirations could have significant impact to production environments if not addressed. The following alert applies to all products that are built on top of WebSphere Application Server, for example: Portal, Sametime, Connections, and Quickr J.

ACTION:  Make sure that your customers are aware of these items and the April 26th date .

1)The password to the Plugin-key.kdb file  that is shipped with the WebSphere Plugin install will expire on April 26, 2012:
 
Please refer to the following link for additional details.  

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21588312

The impact  of the "password expiration issue in the above flash" is that the https transport between the WebSphere plugin and back-end AppServers will stop working, if not resolved.  It means that the Plugin-key.kdb (and the personal & signer certificates in it) will not be loaded during the plugin initialization and the https transport will not be used.

2) The personal certificate  called "WebSphere Plugin Key" within the plugin-key.kdb that is shipped with the WebSphere Plugin install will expire on April 26, 2012:

Please refer to the following link for additional details.  

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21577327

This will affect those WebSphere AppServers that are configured to require SSL client authentication (SSL mutual authentication) and that are using the default WebSphere plug-in key.  Most of our customers did not configure WebSphere AppServers to use SSL mutual authentication between the plug-in and WebSphere AppServers.

QuickrD Bug

A while back, I was made aware of an issue where the Notes client will increase the size of fonts in emails when sent back and forth multiple times.  This link points to the problem description:

https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21201323

The work around is to add a few variables to your servers notes.ini to address this.  So what does this have to do with Quickr?

I was recently discussing a Quickr 8.x > 8.5.1 upgrade when this was encountered.  If you have implemented the work around as listed in the above technote, it will break the Quickr login page.  The rendered HTML will be malformed, and you will not be able to use the Quickr login page which allows for non-directory members logging into the server / places.

Took a bit of figuring and a PMR, and I suspect this is a rare combination of circumstances, but if this can help anyone else, here it is.