What To Choose For New Sametime Installations?

On a Domino for iSeries List to which I subscribe, the question was asked if one would recommend going to 7.0.3. Is it stable on i5 V5R4 yet? The question was asked in relation to running Sametime 7.5.1 CF1 and not having to use the 7.0.1 jvm with the 7.0.2 server code. I hope you find my reply amusing...

7.0.3 is a major bug fix release. If you're planning on a Sametime upgrade or install, I would load up 7.0.3 just so I don't have the hodgepodge of Fixpacks, Hotfixes, Hacked older versions of Java, and convoluted template installs (for DWA/DST/IE7) that are necessary to run Sametime 7.5.1 with Domino 7.0.2 FP2 HF145-9er (10-4?).

Come to think of it, 7.0.2 FP2 seems to have been an extremely crippled piece of software - with all of the hacks and fixes you have to apply to make it "stable"...

I sure hope IBM doesn't get into the 7.0.2 situation again with all of the patches eventually necessary for it to be stable.

Anyway, since I brought up i5/OS - are you planning for your V6R1 upgrades yet?

No NSFDB2 for System i

Ever since NSFDB2 was announced, the System i faithful have been waiting for support on the i. We were told to wait for 7.0.1 or 7.0.2 to then be told to wait for 8.0.x. It's official that there are no plans for it, so we can all stop waiting. Details in the comments from Rob Ingram at the Domino Blog:

There are no current plans to provide this feature on iSeries. We have other very important database work we have committed to reduce NSF data storage and other database optimizations. These improvements should help all of our customers, including those on iSeries.

and

we made our plans in conjunction with many groups, including the iSeries team. This resulted in us facing a tradeoff with other very important storage cost reduction efforts which are being planned for the core NSF database. We always do try to prioritize delivery of new capability to as many Domino customers as possible and we expect that all customers, including those on iSeries, will benefit from these future capablities.

We've known all along that the DB2 UDB implementation on the System i was very different from that on other platforms. Perhaps future releases of i5/OS will remedy this.

Quick System i Tip

Updated - see information below. I've been meaning to post this for a while, but I'm either crazy busy or just slack. :)

If you're installing Domino (or anything for that matter) on a System i, then you should make sure that your joblog is generated when you signoff. Simply prompt the SIGNOFF command and use *LIST for the joblog option. I think just SIGNOFF *LIST will work. Doing this will make sure that you have a record of all the commands processed during your job. For instance, installing Domino does a lot of background stuff with the RSTLICPGM command you have to use. If anything goofy happens you'll want a copy of the joblog to send to support.

UPDATE:

Thanks to César for a quick clarification to this tip:

I prefer the DSPJOBLOG OUTPUT(*PRINT), perhaps because I’m a developer or because I still use the same session for more things.

What I do not suggest is generate a joblog with the SIGNOFF *LIST when you’re removing Domino from your system, due to some functionality of the system I’ve seen “weird” things appear on the joblogs (you know, *MSGF is deleted and joblog is generated/built afterwards).

Regardless, make sure you get a joblog of the install/uninstall... :)

POWER6

Sweet CPU announcement from IBM today - IBM kicks out energy-efficient 4.7GHz POWER6 processor. The new System i boxes we got this year are the Power5+ models clocking at around 2.2GHz. They are insanely powerful and fast - can't wait to see these in action!

"The device reportedly runs "twice as fast" and packs four times the cache as the POWER5, and boasts a processor bandwidth of 300Gbps....preliminary testing showed that all four of the 'most widely used performance benchmarks for Unix servers' were shattered by its CPU."

They will probably be introduced for the System p first and eventually make it to the System i. Time for another NotesBench record!

Four out of Five Complete

Whew... we've migrated 4 out of 5 of our physical iSeries servers over into LPARs on 2 physical System i boxes. The first server we migrated was our Domino cluster box and I started/completed that on 1/27/07. Since then we've migrated a dev server, Domino production box (twice...), and yesterday moved our MiMiX box. This last one will take longer as we have to migrate our entire user base from 5250 "Green Screen" to Webfacing.

This slow process will likely be why I don't post much new Domino content. But I'll try to come up with some stuff...

Now Playing: "Upon The Face of The Waters" by Tony Palacios

New Iron

We moved our production mail, application, and Sametime environment from our iSeries 820 to a new System i 570+ (again). Let's just say that scheduled agents that took about 7 minutes to run with no load now take 50 seconds to run under full load on a Monday... :)

A Quick Update

After we got our new System i up, it went back down that same day (Tuesday). So on Wednesday IBM came back down and swapped out the backplane on the tower in question. The server has stayed powered up since then. Maybe we'll move our Domino data back over to it in a few weeks.

I would move the data this weekend, but we have two guys out next week and on Thursday they are supposed to induce my wife!

This Is Why Our System i Was Failing

After nearly 18 hours of continuous downtime troubleshooting, we found the culprit with IBM. Since there was something pointing to a perceived power failure being the problem, IBM decided to isolate the specific frame that was the issue. But we had to find it first. Since we have two 570 system units and 6 0595 expansion towers in the rack, that would take a lot of power ups and downs. This morning IBM decided to disconnect the SPCN cables from the 570 system units and we were able to power up the box. After eventually isolating it to the second expansion tower (via multiple power up attempts focused on daisy-chaining towers), we isolated it to having something to do with the 2nd tower.

We already banked on having to simply replace the backplane on one of the towers, so we had a backplane en-route. But when one of the IBM techs opened the tower and removed the power supplies, he saw this wedged underneath the power supply against the T14 9-pin connector (this is the connector that a UPS can connect to which alert the system of a power loss...):



This is one of the 4 small electro-static insulators that are placed around the opening of the hole through which the power cable connects to the power supply. Apparently there was enough contact to short out the connector and alert the system of a power loss. And it's been up for about 5 hours now...

WOW!

24!

No, I'm not talking about the TV show - the one I missed last night! I'm talking about the number of hours I've been awake now... Saturday night we moved our production Domino data over to our new System i 570. Things were wonderful when we left - everything checked out.

Then we came in Monday morning to find that the entire server was powered off. Since 9:30 PM Sunday night. So we turned it back on and it came up well. Then Monday evening at about 5:30 it powered off again! My manager called me about 6:30 pm to check on it and we both headed on over because this time it wouldn't power up... And all night it hasn't powered up. We've had IBM technicians here since about 10 pm and they've been on the phone with L3 product engineers. We can't figure it out yet and I just threw back over to the data from our old server. So it's replicating back from our cluster and everything seems to be running along smoothly so far. I'll be up for many more hours I'm sure...

For those interested, we've been thinking it's the FSP (Flexible Service Processor), but it doesn't appear that's the problem. I'm not sure if it's something in the backplane (motherboard) or one of the main 570 units. But, as always, I'll let you know!

Quick Tip for System i Domino Shops (SnTT)

One important thing that System i shops have to keep in mind for Domino is making sure that the owner of all Domino data objects is the user QNOTES. In the past this has been a little difficult because you would have to specify each subdirectory in the path with the CHGOWN command.

But that has changed with Version 5 Release 4 of i5/OS. There is a new SUBTREE parameter for the CHGOWN command.

We have 3 Domino Partitions on one of our System i boxes. The data directories are similar to the following:

/LOTUS/DOMINO/servera
/LOTUS/DOMINO/serverb
/LOTUS/DOMINO/serverc

Now, if I want to make sure that QNOTES is the owner of all of the objects in all of the data directories, I just have to issue the following command:

CHGOWN OBJ('/LOTUS/DOMINO') NEWOWN(QNOTES) SUBTREE(*ALL)

Now Playing: "Seven Days Into Nevermore" by Balance of Power

Technorati: Show-n-tell thursday

Domino on 64-Bit Hardware

The Lotusphere Deployments, Performance, & Interoperability (DPI) Lab Blog posted Friday about Domino and 32-bit, 64-bit, 128-bit and Teraspace topics. Being a System i Lotus Nut, I have posted about this topic before: here, here, and here.

According to the DPI blog, Domino runs on the following 64-bit platforms as a 32-bit application:
* AIX
* Solaris
* Linux on zSeries
* Linux x86_64 (Technote #1231920)
* Windows 2003 x64 Edition (requires 7.0.1 and higher)

But then they state that Domino is actually a 64-bit application as it runs on i5/OS. However, from the first comment it appears that this is going to be coming in the future. My understanding is that Domino is only a 32-bit application in its current iterations, but will be ported to 64-bit in Domino 8(.0.1) (but will also have a 32-bit port). So this DPI blog post was somewhat vague until the 2nd paragraph of the first comment (unless I've missed something) when we read "When 64-bit support for Domino becomes available, Domino for i5/OS will also change to use the i5/OS 64-bit pointer and teraspace support."

Regardless, the post also states that "i5/OS only runs on 64-bit hardware and has been enabled for 64-bit for a long time. i5/OS also provides 128-bit pointer capability." Yes, you read that correctly - i5/OS runs with 128-bit pointers! If you read the quote below, you will see that when the AS/400 (System i) architects were designing the RISC processor-based system, they were going to use a full 96-bit address space back in 1990!! but actually decided to scale it back when they went the PowerPC route! Some of these other Operating Systems (Windows and *NIX) have come to the game rather late.

The best quote from my posts is from my second link above which I'll quote again here. This is from an old book I have here at the office titled Inside the AS/400 by Frank G. Soltis. I have the edition from way back in 1997:

"The AS/400 is the first and only system in the world to have completed the transition to 64-bit computing.... The challenge for the computer industry is how to enable existing software to take advantage of the new hardware designs. The AS/400 is the only system to have met this software challenge - all AS/400 applications are fully 64-bit enabled. No one else is even close.... In contrast, the AS/400's technology-independent architecture protects the system's customers and ISVs from such disruptions as they move to the new 64-bit RISC processors. Existing application software can immediately use the full capabilities of the new hardware." (Inside the AS/400, pp. 1-2)

Then on page 206 we find this:

"Our original RISC processor that we started to design in 1990, which we called C-RISC (the C was for commercial), had a 96-bit address. We had the room for this large address in the pointers and decided to go all the way. When we decided to use the PowerPC architecture in 1991, we scaled the address back to 64 bits."

A New (To Me) Lotus Blogger

I stumbled on this blog when looking through some referrals. It's DominoKeys by Kevin Hansen. Recently he's been discussing the Notes 7.0.2 client for Mac, Nomad (this was the post he linked back to me from), and Microsoft's "It's A Small World". Looking at his personal information it appears that he is (or was) an iSeries guy as well.

If I'm late to the game, allow me to welcome you - it seems you've been bloggin a while!

Now Playing: "Fantasy or Reality" by Arwen

Domino 7.0.2 on iSeries and Time Changes

As I briefly mentioned in the past, there was supposed to be a fix for the Domino software to allow for OS time changes without hanging the Domino server(s). This fix is in SPR# RWAH6HPQ8B for Domino 7.0.2- This iSeries specific fix allows daylight savings time and standard time changes without recycling the Domino server.

I just want to say a huge thank you to IBM for this. I have upgraded 3 of my cluster iSeries Domino partitions to 7.0.2 and they didn't have any problems with the time change this weekend. Now to get to my production partitions...

Now Playing: "Solid As The Sun" by Neal Morse

Technorati: Lotus Domino, iSeries

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

Need to Search for System i Information?

Just come to my blog! I have added the iSociety/System iPortal search box to my blog. So, if you can't remember www.systemiportal.com, then just come here and search.

Now Playing: "Little Wing" by Derek and the Dominos

Technorati: System i, iSeries

Disabling Domino Platform Statistics

By default, each Domino server/partition (DPAR) will collect platform statistics. Since we have 3 DPARs on each iSeries, I have disabled platform statistic collection on our application and IM servers. This will just free them up to do other things and not duplicate the statistic collections from multiple DPARs on one platform. I'm sure there's not much overhead to the platform stats collection, but why have 3 (or more) DPARs duplicating that effort? So if you're using Domino partitioning, you may want to disable platform stats for all but one of the DPARs. It's something I've always overlooked, but every CPU cycle counts for something, right?

The line to add to the notes.ini is: Platform_Statistics_Disabled=1

Now Playing: "Anyday" by Derek and the Dominos

Technorati: Lotus Domino

Certifiable Domino for iSeries Admin

This morning I passed exam number 855 - "iSeries Domino Technical Solutions V5R3." So, I guess I'm "officially" a Domino for iSeries geek... :) I was also the first person to take an exam at COMMON this Fall.

iSOCIETY, System iPortal, and Truth

Attention System i users!

Several new marketing tools were announced today at the Fall 2006 COMMON conference Town Hall Meeting earlier today. The first is a user portal called iSOCIETY.org. "It's like facebook for adults" was one of the comments. You should go signup from the website. Temporarily, the site is isociety.common.org, but iSOCIETY.org is coming soon.

Second is the System iPortal. It's a single point of reference for System i information. You can search the web, code, blogs, etc... for all things System i related. No more Googling for: dns configuration and AS400 or iSeries or i5 or System i. Since I post a lot of Domino information related to System i, I've requested my blog to be added to the blog search. Some of you should do the same. Soon, I will also have a System iPortal search section on this site.

Perhaps the most anticipated announcement is a new marketing initiative by IBM focused on the System i. There will be some cool "viral marketing" television commercials. We were shown a preview of one of the two. Basically, it's IT guys that get fed up with all of the server sprawl associated with Wintel servers. It's something we Domino folks like to point to as well - being able to consolidate MS implementations onto a single Domino system. The i want control/truth features the ability to add your own comment about System i. See if you can find mine. It's a really slick site that can really help generate some buzz for the public to see how much the Systm i is loved. My only concern is related to the url that was on the preview commercial we saw. It's ibm.com/iwantcontrol/truth - it could be a little much for potential customers to remember.

iSOCIETY and System iPortal are excellent examples of what a dedicated customer base can do to spread the word about the best computer system on the market. The Truth marketing campaign should (hopefully) allow IBM to better position the System i as the amazing "integrated" system that it is. Keep up the great work to all who are involved - especially "Angus!"

Technorati: System i, iSeries, COMMON

Welcome To Miami!

Well, Chris Moody and I arrived in Miami Beach this afternoon for the COMMON iSeries Conference. What do you think of the weather? This is a shot from the balcony of the hotel room.



There were some cool lightning bolts that I couldn't get, though. This storm came fast and left just as quickly. It is humid here - even worse than in South Carolina. I'm pretty pumped about the trip. My presentation with Kim Greene on Domino Domain Monitoring is on Tuesday.

Chris and I have been just hanging out this afternoon. We're watching some football now. After he and I ate, I hung out with 4 iSeries people. One of them has her own consulting firm and the other three work for IBM in Rochester, MN.

A Small World

We started back our Thursday morning men's Bible study today after taking off for the summer. We have a new guy to the area and the group. He said he does computer work at BoA, so I asked him what kind. "I administer AS/400s." I said - "me too!" That was pretty crazy to start a Thursday morning.

Now Playing: "Glasgow Kiss" by John Petrucci