Push Notifications app floods the SystemOut.log

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After upgrading the Connections environment at my main customer to IBM Connections 6.0 CR3 the SystemOut.log of the PushNotifications Server was flooded with these messages:

[28/01/19 15:51:59:709 CET] 00000306 PNSSecurityPo W com.ibm.lconn.pushnotification.bayeux.auth.PNSSecurityPolicy unable to get or set advice from application.
[28/01/19 15:52:02:491 CET] 0000031e PNSSecurityPo W com.ibm.lconn.pushnotification.bayeux.auth.PNSSecurityPolicy unable to get or set advice from application.

I suspected the messages itself were quite harmless, but wanted to make sure and therefore PMR’d this problem. I initially received some very weird responses from IBM. At this client the Connections mobile client isn’t used. IBM therefore persisted that I could just disable the push notifications application through the LCC.xml as they said the push notifications application is only used by the mobile client. Only after I explained to them that the Push Application is also used by the browser and Connections desktop plugin, my PMR got some serious attention. The answer was interesting enough to blog about it. Apparently there was a change in the handshake protocol between the Push Notifications application and the Connections Desktop plugin. Therefore if you use IBM Connections 6.0 CRx (not sure when the push notifications application got an update) and an old version of the IBM Connections Desktop plugin, you’ll get these errors. The desktop plugin at this client is from November 2017. IBM says the errors can be safely ignored. To get rid of them a newer version of the desktop plugin needs to be rolled out.