Passed My 7.0 Domino Administration Update Exam

I thought I would give it a try this morning. I passed it! :) It was pretty thorough with a lot of questions about DDM. I hadn't taken exam 623 yet, so I guess I'll have to take that to get my "Advanced" certification....

Now Playing: "Hope Fails" by Return of the King Soundtrack

Sametime 7.5 CF1

I was going to test out the Sametime 7.5 Mobile client that IBM just released and in looking at the documentation I found that there is a Cumulative Fixpack #1 for Sametime 7.5. See the fixlist here. Actually, Adam Gartenberg just posted about its availability as well - it was just released today. That explains why I had not seen anything about it.

I just loaded it on my test server. As I was reading the documentation and fixes, I noticed a lot of fixes for the Connect Client. But, there was not a separate download. I asked myself: "Self, do you think they are dropping the requirement to manually copy the connect client(s) to be able to download from the Sametime server?" Turns out that they have! On the Client splash screen we now see "AIM Certified Partner" and "Y! Messenger" logos!

Now Playing: "The Black Gate" by Return of the King Soundtrack

Technorati: Lotus Sametime 7.5

It's A Boy!!!

We went to the doctor this morning for our 19-week ultrasound and it's a boy!! A name is still pending... :)



Now Playing: "So Near So Far" by Angra

Two Funny Comments This Week

I'm not sure what's going on here, but there have been two funny comments at my site this past week.

First was Ben who posted the following in the NSFBufferPool thread:
Now there is a sentence that will likely never cross my lips (or keyboard) except as a quote: "The other week I decided to check into my NSF Buffer Pool settings" Ahh, there are days I'm really glad I'm not an administrator. I'm glad that you all exist, but I eat my veggies, I brush my teeth, I exercise, so I can feel virtuous and never, ever have to check my NSF Buffer Pool settings.

Second was Kevin who posted in the "Dark Side" thread:
"Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed. The ability to provide word processing is insignificant next to the power of the @Function!" :-)

What comedians we have out there!!

Now Playing: "The Shadow Hunter" by Angra

Flash Drive for Nomad

OK everyone, time to go pick up this flash drive for your Nomad installations. I think it will have enough space for even the largest mail file replica!

Kanguru 32GB Flash Max Drive - Only $1499!! - and no, I didn't miss a decimal place. $1,499.99 to be exact!

Treo 650 with BlackBerry Connect and DAMO

Since Cingular finally released BBConnect for the Treo 650, I have someone testing it out. It works alright. I posted about this in April and it's pretty much the same. The thing that we really don't dig is that the account has to have the BlackBerry plan (~$40) as well as a MediaNET plan (~$40). The MediaNet plan is necessary if you want to use the Internet Browser on the phone. It will definitely be a niche product for people who just have to keep their Treo. But that may all change when they try out a BlackBerry Pearl!

Also, we have a workgroup that needs to use Outlook to demo a product they sell for VoIP integration. So, I'm working on loading DAMO 6.5.5 on their Outlook 2003 clients. I cringe every time I VNC to one of their computers to set it up... At least it's just 6 users!

Now Playing: "Make Believe Jesus" by Shane & Shane

The dark side of the Lotus

I'm working on a project for a workgroup at my company and they're really digging the Domino web application that I have for them. One of the guys sent me an email with the title of this post as the subject with the following image...



Now Playing: "He Is Exalted" by Shane & Shane

David's Blog of common sense

I just stumbled on this blog today: David's Blog of common sense. It's a mostly political blog and lately David Taylor has been mostly focusing on the Spratt/Norman race in SC's 5th District. But, he talks about national items as well. You should go check him out - it's great to see another Rock Hill blogger! He was even referenced on The O'Reilly Factor.

How is your NSF Buffer Pool? (SnTT)

The other week I decided to check into my NSF Buffer Pool settings - specifically the percent of database reads in the buffer pool. The buffer pool is a shared memory space that you can control on your Domino server. The "trick" is to have the "PercentReadsInBuffer" greater than 95%. If it is less than 95%, you may want to tweak the NSF_Buffer_Pool_Size_MB notes.ini value. This can take some time to achieve a good ratio. If your Buffer Pool is too high, then you're wasting system memory that can be better used for other tasks. If it's too low, then you might be able to increase it to find a good value so that a higher percentage of the reads are in the buffer pool.

IBM only recommends changing this on partitioned servers since you are sharing the memory. Most of the buffer pool information revolves around R5. Part of the reason for having this setting was that (ahem) "certain platforms" had low numbers for the maximum server memory. The buffer pool would let you allocate a specific amount for this Domino process. I think I set all of my servers buffer pools late last year and haven't touched them or really looked at the performance, so I was happy when I saw my PercentReads numbers! The old defaults were 300MB if you didn't change the buffer pool size. After having tweaked some of my servers, it turned out that 300 was a pretty good number for me. And Sametime servers can actually have a really low buffer pool setting since they normally aren't opening a lot of NSFs. Here are mine - how are yours?

Issue the following command from your server console: show stat database.database.b*

Production Mail Server: 450MB Buffer - 99.81% reads in buffer!
Production App Server: 300MB Buffer - 96.33% reads in buffer
Production IM Server: 50MB Buffer - 96.34% reads in buffer
Cluster Mail Server: 360MB Buffer - 98.44% reads in buffer
Cluster App Server: 300MB Buffer - 97.6% reads in buffer

Now Playing: "See No Evil" by Holy Soldier

Technorati: Show-n-tell thursday

Question Regarding Lotus Notes and Broadsoft Integration

I haven't been able to find much regarding integration between Lotus Notes and Broadsoft (a VoIP system). Currently, Broadsoft offers a toolbar for MS Outlook called BroadWorks Assistant - Enterprise. We use the Broadsoft platform and I have been asked about getting the same toolbar into Lotus Notes. Of course, if Broadsoft isn't planning on doing this, then this would mean custom development. I don't see why Broadsoft would just shrug off ~42% of all corporate mail customers, but that's beside the point. My gut instinct is that it will be much easier to achieve this with a plugin to Hannover (if one wanted to go the route of a toolbar). I've Googled and searched devWorks with no results.

Do any of my readers know anyone who has worked on this? I'm not familiar with Broadsoft at all. I'm thinking that it would probably be easier to integrate any of the integration directly into a mail and/or nab template rather than try to code a custom toolbar.

Nice Hit Piece on Ralph Norman by The Herald in Rock Hill

When The Herald's search feature is working for the archives, I'll get the link to their story from a couple of weeks ago. But I did see one person write in an editorial about it in yesterday's paper titled "Herald crucifies Ralph Norman". It was a top fold, front page article.

Basically, The Herald sent out reporters looking for illegal workers on Warren Norman Co. building projects. They found 3 people who claimed to be "illegal alien invaders" (as Jeff Katz puts it) on 2 separate job sites. These people did not work for Ralph Norman's company (as the article did state), but rather they worked for sub-contractors that the company uses. Since the article did point those things out, I will give it some fairness. However, it was clearly intended to point out some hypocrisy by Ralph Norman since he is running on changing laws to better protect our borders. This is something that John "I have a seat at the table" Spratt hasn't been able to do in a quarter of a century in Washington and it's the Spratt laws that allow the Norman sub-contractors to hire those who are in our country illegally.

Speaking of hypocrisy, I have two further points. First, there was another editoral sent to The Herald and printed yesterday titled Herald hypocritical on immigration. It has some good points about The Herald on one hand stating that they believe the government should have to stop it and stating on the other that it should be up to small businesses. Each point was made independent of the other.

Secondly, let's address the hypocrisy of pointing out that it's bad for a company to hire illegals but not doing anything about it. I have a question for The Herald: When you found out that these people were violating the laws of our country, what did you do to stop it? Since you were specifically looking for people to admit to being here illegally, why did you not have INS waiting around the corner to have them deported? It seems you don't really care about their immigration status - rather you would just like to make a political candidate look bad!

Technorati: Ralph Norman, John Spratt, South Carolina

Some Personal Downtime This Weekend

Monday is my firstborn's 3rd Birthday! Where did the time go? We're going to head down to Surfside Beach, SC tonight for a long weekend. The last time we went, we found a really good Italian place just 5 minutes away in Garden City. It's Nico's of NY. We really enjoyed it, but from looking at the reviews I don't believe we'll try for the "early bird special" unless I'm there way before 5! I'll have ye old crackBerry, so I may try to keep up with some blogs here and there.

Confess Your AOL IM "Prank Gone Awry"

OK, time for you to confess your AOL Instant Messenger (or other IM program) "prank gone awry" (i.e. Foley). Here's mine.

My freshman year of college was great to have AOL free for almost a whole year. Though it was dial-up, we had a few guys who would just get the free trials and have them extended several months. My roomie and I had an account on his blazing Acer laptop. It was an Intel 95MHz I think. Super fast! Anyway, I digress...

Some of us decided to "play the player" (my roomie). We knew that his singing group was going on a trip the next weekend. So, we used a new screenname and posed as a girl that was in a chatroom with him. It just so happened that he was singing in the same town she lived in! This was probably Monday or Tuesday. He was pretty pumped up to meet this girl. We even found a tasteful picture of an attractive girl and sent him. Man, I don't know how I kept my composure. About Thursday that week, we finally broke the news to him that he was being played - poor guy. It was sooo hilarious!!!

Now Playing: "Water Under The Bridge" by Jars of Clay

See The Morning

Here is some pretty awesome news about Chris Tomlin's new CD See The Morning. This is from the 268 Blog:

It was pretty amazing today as the charts from week one were released. STM landed at the top of the Christian charts AND at #15 on the Billboard Top 200. That's #15 out of every CD out there last week, a bold statement and a lot of songs of hope and light floating around the nation. We're humbled and excited... and we know this is only the beginning.

Thanks for your prayers and support!
Louie

This CD is awesome. It's not only amazing that a CD by a Christian artist debuts in top 20 of Billboard, but this is a worship album. Like Louie said, it's "a lot of songs of hope and light".

Here are some lyrics from the song Rejoice:

See the morning, see it rising
Over the mountains high
See the mercy in the mighty
Hand of God

Lving water come and fill us
Only You can satisfy
Turn our sorrow into singing
The song of life

Rejoice, rejoice
Sing with the angel voices
Rejoice, rejoice
All heaven and earth rejoice

Lord, Your strength is a tower
The righteous run into
Lord, Your love is a banner over us

And we hold onto the promise
That Your hold on us is true
There's no other like You, Jesus
No one like You

Now Playing: "Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone)"" by Chris Tomlin

Technorati: Chris Tomlin

Upgraded to Sametime 7.5 on iSeries (SnTT)

Last Friday night I upgraded our internal Sametime server to 7.5. As part of that process, I had to upgrade the the 6.5.4FP1 Domino server to Domino 7.0.1 and then upgrade ST 6.5.1FP1 to 7.5. This worked like a champ and we haven't had any issues with the server this week. It was a very smooth upgrade.

One thing that we have been waiting on to be "fixed" was the poor screen sharing capabilities of ST 7.0 and earlier. It's one reason I didn't worry about taking the server to 7.0. After testing the screen sharing of ST 7.5 on my test server, I was very pleased with what I saw. So, this was a good reason for us to upgrade. We may be able to get rid of a WebEx account. Speaking of screen sharing, we did have one ST server crash this week while holding a test meeting. I've worked with Lotus a bit on that and it may be related to the Meeting Room preference to optimize screen sharing for performance. This basically drops the color depth to 8 bit and looks pretty bad. The NSD showed a crash due to some type of conversion. I'm thinking it may be the 8 bit conversion, but neither Lotus or I could reproduce this.

Another "gotcha" that we ran into is with the DWA integration with chat. There were actually 2 gotchas. First of all, if you are upgrading the Sametime server and you have chosen to have your DWA server set to load STLinks from the DWA server, you will need to delete the domino/html/sametime/stlinks directory on the DWA server and copy over the stlinks directory from the IM server. Then restart the DWA server's HTTP task and it works! Since I could see the java console error in IE about a StartIM{} function call, I figured it was something with the stlinks jar file. I think this may be the case if you have a 7.0 or earlier stlinks folder on your DWA server.

The second gotcha is also with DWA and I haven't actually "confirmed" it. We are almost complete with an MS XP migration from Windows 2000 in our company. Since going to ST 7.5, I have actually seen that a Win2K user without the Sun JVM worked for a day with the MS VM but then their DWA chat failed and I had to load the Sun JVM. That's really odd that it would work and then fail. It appears that only Sun JVM is supported, though.

Now Playing: "Taking Notes Podcast #34" by Bruce & Julian

Technorati: Show-n-tell thursday

Domino 7.0.2 for System i - New WRKDOMSVR Options

For you System i folks out there, there are 3 new options under F23 for the WRKDOMSVR command. I have only loaded the release - I have not upgraded any servers to 7.0.2 yet. The new options are:

14 - Work with support files - This opens the IBM_TECHNICAL_SUPPORT directory.
15 - Work with NSDs - This opens the IBM_TECHNICAL_SUPPORT directory and only displays nsd* files.
16 - Dump server call stacks - This will create spooled files for each job running in the particular Domino partition.

It's great to have these options right from the server management screen! I just have to remember the numbers now...

As a side note, before you load the QNOTESRL savf, make sure that nobody is using the WRKDOMSVR command. The panel group objects may not get updated correctly. I had to redo my install of the Domino release files because I was receiving an error when doing WRKDOMSVR. This is not something specific to Domino 7.0.2, though, as others have had it happen on previous versions.

Now Playing: "Be The Quiet" by Disciple

Technorati: Lotus Domino