After I had to reinstall an IBM Connections 3.0.1 system (a HDD crash destroyed the installation and of course Murphy made sure the customer did not have a working backup) I realized, that certain tasks did not run correctly anymore.  The SystemOut.log from the WebSphere Application Server showed the following error message:

 

ASYN9999E: Unexpected Exception Occurred: com.ibm.websphere.asynchbeans.SerialDeserialException: Exception while deserializing a saved service. Service=security. Unable to deserialize the Subjects in this Context, cause: Validation of LTPA token failed due to invalid keys or token type.

 

According to this support document this means that either not all fixes are installed correctly or that the search tasks in the databases are either broken or saved with wrong or non-valid LTPA tokens.  The correct way to solve this ist deleting the tasks, which can usually be done easily using the wsadmin-console (here the description in the IBM Connections Wiki).  After a restart of the applications the tasks are then recreated automatically. This is how it’s done:

 

\DMGR01\bin\wsadmin -lang jython -user wasadmin – password password

execfile(“connectionsConfig.py”)

In a cluster select “1”

Scheduler.listAllTasks() – this shows all available tasks

Scheduler.clearAllTasks() – this deletes all tasks

restart Cluster to recreate all tasks

 

Unfortunately in my case the wsadmin-console kept telling me, that the corresponding application is not running and therefore the task cannot be deleted (of course the newly reinstalled applications were running).  The only way out was deleting the tasks directly in the database. Using DB2 you need to start the DB2-Control Center and access the Connections database.  The above mentioned  Scheduler.listAllTasks() shows in which component / database which task resides: Communities, Activities, Forums, Profiles, Files, Wikis, News and Search (both in the Homepage DB).  So you need to open each database and click on the left on Tables. Now you can open the needed table by double clicking it. In the now opened windows you can select the task and then click on Delete Row followed by hitting the Commit button. This deletes the tasks.

The tables with the entries to delete are:

Communities:

DB: SNCOMM – COMMUNITIESSCHEDULERTASK

Activities:

DB: OPNACT – OA_SCHEDULERTASK

Forum:

DB: FORUM – DF_SCHEDULERTASK

Profiles:

DB: PEOPLEDB – PROFILES_SCHEDULERTASK

Files:

DB: FILES – SCHEDULERTASK

Wikis:

DB: WIKIS – SCHEDULERTASK

News:

DB: HOMEPAGE – NR_SCHEDULER_TASK

Search:

DB: HOMEPAGE – LOTUSCONNECTIONSTASK

Once you’re done: Restart IBM Connections and all tasks are recreated and should be running fine.

The reason in my case for this problem was that the tasks were created using the old installation of Connections.  After I had to reinstall Connections including the WebSphere Application Server the LTPA tokens were newly created and not the same as the ones saved in the DB. Therefore the tasks complained about the LTPA validity.