Remedy Is Here...

This new album, Remedy, from David Crowder Band is awesome!! Check out the 268 Blog. It's good to hear studio mixes for "Glory of it All" and "Everything Glorious" as they were only available on live compilations previously. There's even a special guest guitarist on "We Won't Be Quiet": The Nuge - yep that Nuge...

The lyrics to the title track are excellent and inspiring...

here we are
here we are
the broken and used
mistreated abused
here we are

here you are
here you are
the beautiful one
who came like a sun
here you are

so we lift up our voices
and open our hands
to cling to a love that we can't comprehend

o lift up your voices
and lift up your hands
to sing of the love that has freed us from sin

he is the one who has saved us
he is the one who embraced us
he is the one who has come and is coming again
he's the remedy

here we are
here we are
bandaged and bruised
awaiting a cure
here we are

here you are
here you are
our beautiful king
bringing relief
here you are with us

so we lift up our voices
and open our hands
let go of the things that have kept us from him

he is the one who has saved us
he is the one who forgave us
he is the one who has come and is coming again
he's the remedy

oh i can't comprehend
i can't take it all in
never understand such perfect love
come for the broken and beat
for the wounded and weak
oh come fall at his feet
he's the remedy
he's the remedy

he is the one who has saved us
he is the one who forgave us
he is the one who has come and is coming again
he's the remedy
he's the remedy
oh he's the remedy

you are the one who has saved us
you are the one who forgave us
you are the one who has come and is coming again
You're the one who has come and you're coming again
You're the one who has come and is coming again
to make it all right
you're the remedy

you're in us
you're the remedy
you're in us
you're the remedy

let us be the remedy
let us bring the remedy

"Lotus Notes Diagnostic Tool" Has Been Released

Hat tip to Jack Dausman for this info! As Jack said, this is for Admins what NotesPeek is for developers! The download can be found in The Sandbox. Once you download it, you'll want to run the setup program and then sign the local notes database. I'm hoping that (more of) this code will be extended to the Fault Analysis code that's on Domino 7+ servers as it already does some of this.

From Jack's blog:

If you are programmer, you might remember the excitement when NotesPeek and NotesPing were first released. Well, LND is the definitive administration tool for Domino failure analysis and will be quite worthwhile to study.

It has some cool features, like recreating the server doc from a DXL dump, NSD file comparisons, and reading through all the semaphore locks.

It does come with a help document , but there isn't much hand holding--you are going to need to know the terms and architecture of Domino to really extract value from LND.

After a quick test drive, I agree. It does a good job of gathering all of the relevant information and presenting it in a friendlier format than the NSD. Kudos to IBM for releasing this. It won't tell you "Hey, here is exactly why you had this crash", but it will get you pretty close...

Good Game Gamecocks!

My favorite team, the #12 Carolina Gamecocks went to Death Valley* today in Louisiana to face the #2 LSU Tigers. It started off with Carolina going up 7-0 followed by 28 unanswered points by LSU. We ended the game with a field goal and touchdown to make it a 28-16 final. While we looked a little messy at times, we actually scored some points against LSU. In the first three games this year, LSU only allowed 7 points total! They're tough and they ran hard against our defense (taking advantage of taking out our star linebacker about 2 minutes into the game).

Oh yeah, what's better is that I watched it at my BFF Chris's house. :)

* - Not to be confused with the copied Death Valley that's in Clemson, SC. This is the team that stole the stadium name, fight song, and mascot from LSU...

Domino 8: 101 - Prevent Simple Search and Deferred Sort

The two items I will discuss below are enhancements to Domino 8 that may impact disk space and/or memory utilization on your servers. The first may also impact your end-users, so you should be aware of the caveats of enabling it.

Prevent Simple Search:
This option is found in the Advanced tab of the Database Properties dialog. It's called "Don't allow simple search" in that dialog. This will prevent someone from performing a search in a database that is not full-text indexed. Performing a search on a database without an index is a very time consuming process and the results are generally not as you would expect when compared to the search time and results returned from an indexed database. Enabling this option will prevent this type of search. However, many end-users may not know that they are doing this (by not noticing, or caring, that the database is not indexed) and will be used to performing searches. If you enable this option on mail files, be aware that you may receive many requests to create full-text indexes for those end-users who may have been performing simple searches. Creating these indexes will add to the overall drive space that is needed on your server.

Deferred Sort Index Creation:
This option can be a fairly decent space saver on your server. It is a design property, "Defer index creation until first use", of sortable columns and is visible under the "Click on column header to sort" option. What this option does is prevents the indexing of specific columns when the view is created. For example, most users may never sort their mail file using the Response Icons column. Prior to having this option, however, that column's sort index would have been included in the space used by the view.

So exactly how much space can this save?

Let me use my mail file as an example. After perusing through Designer to see how this option is enabled by default in the mail8 template, I notice that the Subject, Size, and Response columns have this option enabled. So, after purging the view index of my All Documents view (~1,500 docs), I opened that view. The initial size was 1,147,984 bytes (so, just over 1MB). I then sorted by the Subject column and the size increased 28%. I then proceeded to sort by the Size column and the increase was another 29%. Finally, I sorted the Response column and the size increased another 28%. In total, my view index for All Documents is now 2,132,224 bytes. This represents an 85% increase over the initial size of the view. Of course, with a relatively small mail file this will not have as much impact, but just imagine the savings with a much larger file.

I'm hoping that this "Domino 8: 101" series will be helpful as you continue your planning to upgrade to Domino 8 and evaluating the things that you, as an Administrator, will need to know. There have been many features added in Domino 8.0 - even though it was mostly a client-focused release. As you can see from previous posts in this series, IBM has a focus on saving space and time with Domino 8 and beyond. Just this week, an additional NSF compression algorithm was announced with 8.0.1 and there is more planned for Domino Next.

Some Things Never Change: Bring Back The Bronco...

So 13 years later he gets busted for robbing some sports memorabilia - the irony. Five words:

If the glove don't fit...

Domino 8: 101 - Server OS Upgrades

In planning for Domino 8, it may be possible that you will have to upgrade the Operating System that your Domino 7 (or 6 or earlier) servers are running. For more information, see the detailed system requirements here.

In some of these cases, such as Windows 2000, this is because the Operating System is no longer supported by the vendor. However, there is currently no set EOS date for i5/OS V5R3. However, this is not a supported OS for Domino 8.

The following operating systems are not supported for Domino 8. If you are running one of these with any prior version of Domino, you will need to upgrade the OS to be in a supported configuration for Domino 8. Please note that the latest release levels of all of these platforms are still supported and that it is generally recommended to stay fairly recent on the Operating Systems in your environment. There is also no rip-and-replace involved (as with other messaging platforms) - the most current OS levels were supported for Domino 7.0. So, if you are current on your OS and current on your Domino installation, you will have no issues upgrading to Domino 8. Also, I'm in no way criticizing IBM for this move to only support the latest OS release levels - just making you aware of it for your planning purposes.

OS Platforms Not Supported For Domino 8.0:

Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows 2000 Server
Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server
IBM AIX
IBM AIX 5.2(4) (64-bit kernel)
Linux
Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 8
Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 9
RHEL 4
Sun Solaris
Sun Solaris 9 (64-bit kernel)
IBM System i
IBM i5/OS, V5R3
IBM System z
IBM z/OS Version 1, Release 5 or later
Linux on System z
SLES 8 & 9
RHEL 4

Where Were You 6 Years Ago Today?

I was sitting at work when my mom called to tell me that a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center. I thought she was crazy until I turned on Fox News in our server room and got my colleagues in there watching. Then hearing reports that the Pentagon was hit. Then the second plane hit the other tower and a plane crashed in Pennsylvania. Then the towers fell... It was really surreal and words can't describe it. Just a couple of weeks ago I took the picture below. It's a shot of two flags standing at the site of the World Trade Center with a plane flying just overhead...



And here is a shot of the construction that's happening at Ground Zero:


It was really odd to see this site nearly 6 years later. I wish they had it a little more open - there was a wrap around the fencing and you could only find gaps to look through.

For the past few years I've posted the lyrics to Dream Theater's Sacrificed Sons about 9/11. It's a pretty powerful song. You can find those lyrics here.

And here is a video of them playing the song live in Rome.

New Gear - G&L Tribute ASAT Special

07 - Front Angle, originally uploaded by topherssgtp.

Just got this in yesterday. I consider it a great deal from eBay! This thing plays wonderfully, the finish is excellent and the tone is fabulous. With the tone level at 10, you get the tele-twang. Back off and you get some nice P90ish tones. Check out the Flickr slideshow here.

If you don't know, G&L are George Fullerton and Leo Fender. Both are from Fender guitar fame. In a nutshell, they later split and started G&L. Leo Fender considered the G&L guitars his best work. And that's saying a LOT!

This one will be named "OT" in honor of my second born. I have a Takamine acoustic that's "EG" in honor of my firstborn. (ATTN: Wife - are you seeing a trend??) And my Les Paul is "Blondie" along with my Jackson, "Jenny", both in tribute to my wife... :) The G&L should fill in the tone gaps left from the Lester and the triple-bucker Jackson! ;)

Thanks Mom and Dad! :)

My Post Was Spoofed!!!

My Domino 8 ODS48 post from the other day was spoofed!! Some wiseguy thought she'd have some fun with it. Turns out it was my wife and her spoof is hilarious!!

Check it out here

Go Gamecocks

With a huge SEC East win tonight against UGA, the USC Gamecocks are at 2-0. My college dorm-mate Jay has some videos of past wins against UGA... :)

Way to go team!!

Domino 8: 101 - ODS 48

A new On Disk Structure (ODS) is available with Domino 8. This is an update from ODS43 to ODS48. First of all, upgrading applications (formerly called databases) to ODS48 is completely optional and requires the addition of a notes.ini setting on the server (or client).

This setting is: Create_R8_Databases=1.

If you enable this in a global configuration document, the Pre-8 servers will ignore it and will not be affected by having this setting. This can be a good way to propogate this to all (or many) of your servers prior to upgrading to Domino 8. As with previous ODS upgrades, a copy-style compact is required to upgrade all databases to the new ODS. However, the applications will not be upgraded automatically with a copy-style compact as they were with previous ODS upgrades unless the notes.ini setting is enabled.

What do I get with the new ODS?

1. There are some general I/O enhancements and "folder optimizations".

2. The maintaining of a "Database Names List" used for user renames
With ODS48, a list of all of the Readers and Authors in an application is maintained at a high level by default. This will improve the efficiency by which AdminP can process the user rename requests ("Update User Name in Reader and Author Fields"). If AdminP finds the user's name in the Database Names List, it will continue processing that application. Otherwise it will skip the application.

3. Design Compression
This database property (found on the Advanced tab of ODS43 and ODS48 database properties) will compress the design notes. IBM states that mail files based off of mail8.ntf will only utilize 11MB instead of 25MB if design compression is enabled. As you can see, 14MB of savings per mail file can be huge. This feature is disabled on all databases by default. However, the mail8.ntf template does have it enabled. You may choose to disable this property in the template prior to creating new mail files or converting existing mail files to version 8.

As with enabling ODS48, a copy-style compact is required to enable design compression. If you are planning on upgrading to ODS48 and enabling Design Compression on mail files, you should consider doing these at the same time by enabling the Design Compression property prior to running the compact so that you don't have to run the copy-style compact twice.

In planning your Domino 8 upgrade, the considerations above regarding the new ODS should assist you in deciding whether or not you will wish to enable ODS48.

NCAA Football Is Upon Us....

In honor of that I have changed my blog template colors to reflect my team - The University of South Carolina Gamecocks! We'll see how the year is going to be after this week's matchup against the Georgia Bulldogs...

Classic I.T. Dilbert Today

Seems like we've all been there and done that...

Brief Recap of This Week

For most of this week I was at a client outside of NYC. This being my first time there, I had to go to the city. On Monday night I drove to Lower Manhattan. The drive down FDR was an experience in itself - not to mention the time I got turned around... I took some pictures that you can see here. I basically walked around the Seaport and then walked up Fulton St. to see Ground Zero. That was really crazy. You'll see one of my photos was a plane flying above two flags where the towers used to be. I can't believe it's been nearly 6 years and can't imagine the chaos...

I purchased a stubhub ticket to the Yankees/Red Sox game on Tuesday night. But Curt Stone really came through in the clutch and was able to get 4 tickets for free!! So I sold my ticket and got 1/2 of my ticket cost back and was able to hang out with Curt, his bro-in-law, and my client. Definitely some points there. Curt has a recap of the night too with a picture of him and me at the stadium and here are some pictures I took. Enjoyed it pal - thanks!! Everyone told me that getting out would be a nightmare (yes, I drove to the game too - the client thought I was either crazy or brave for driving to the city, twice!), but it only took me about 50 minutes from the time I got in the car to get to the hotel (which would normally be about a 35 minute drive).

And on Wednesday night I met up with Mitch Cohen in Teaneck, NJ. He's that Lotus Connections guru... :) We met for dinner and talked forever. He's a great guy and it was good to put a face with the name - thanks for hanging out Mitch!

Things went great and I ended up staying pretty busy in the evenings too. It was so cool to hang out with a couple of bloggers while I was there!

Go Yankees!!!

P8280028, originally uploaded by topherssgtp.

This pic wasn't just grabbed from the internet... :) More later... Thanks Curt!

Exchange Server Has Viruses - Claims Microsoft

exchangeviruses, originally uploaded by topherssgtp.

One of the things "we" like to point out is that Lotus is more secure when it comes to viruses. Well, according to Microsoft's Exchange site, they have "Viruses" built-in to their Exchange product. Check out the scrolling banner... :)

Happy Birthday Mom!!

Mom's Birthday, originally uploaded by topherssgtp.

My parents came to town this weekend and we celebrated mom's birthday. Happy Birthday Mom - we love you!!!

The Shiny New Notes Client - Back To The Future!!!

The opening paragraph from the upgrade Redbook (Page 21) states it all:

The Notes ... client interface has been completely redesigned. This interface looks and acts more like a browser, and integrates the regular Notes client function with access to the Web better than it did before. Many of the things you used to do in the Release ... client are now only one mouse-click away.

Oh I'm sorry, I was reading from the wrong Redbook. That was the Notes/Domino R4 To R5 Upgrade book from March 2000. Let's see what the ND8 team came up with at the Interface page (as I've also seen written elsewhere):

It’s here! IBM® Lotus Notes® and IBM Lotus® Domino® 8 software showcases a modern, Web-like look-and-feel in a familiar Lotus Notes client format. Updated to help you work smarter, the new user interface presents the tools you need, when and where you need them. It’s visually appealing, highly consistent and feature rich. That means you get your job done faster, and easier. And, you enjoy it along the way. Who says work can’t be fun, too?

Sorry...I had to.

Notes and Domino 8 are so far beyond R5, but both releases were significant in their own right. Hopefully I got a laugh out of some of you! Congrats to IBM on ND8!

Consider Shopping At Circuit City

win98ccity, originally uploaded by topherssgtp.

As you can see from this demo kiosk at Circuit City this past Saturday, they may need some more revenue to upgrade some systems... ;)

A Response To Volker's Latest Issue With Notes

I have posted this as a comment at Volker's post * on IBM Technote 1267071: Changes in Lotus Spreadsheets document do not save

Regarding the issue Volker raises here, I believe I have found the problem and there is a VERY simple workaround and this issue is probably unlikely to be seen in most real world uses.

If you create a new spreadsheet or open an existing one, go to a cell and type something. If you click into another cell or hit tab or enter and then click the "x" to close the spreadsheet, then you will always receive the prompt to save the spreadsheet. If you just type something in a single cell but don't navigate to another cell, then you will not receive the prompt to save the modification. A bug indeed, but the IBM Technote should be updated. I will also be notifying Lotus via a response to the technote with how to reproduce this and also to hopefully modify the technote with a note to tab out of the field to receive the prompt for saving the modifications.

* It's ironic that I'm responding to someone who is "neither a business partner, a design partner nor a customer" of the Lotus products, but this is how Volker describes his involvement with Lotus products. I felt that since so many people will see the issue he raised that I would also let you know how to easily avoid the issue that was pointed out by someone who claims to not be a user of the product.

Getting Lotus Connections 1.0.0 To Work With Domino LDAP

If you haven't seen already, Mitch Cohen has documented an infrastructure with Lotus Connections talking to Domino LDAP for authentication. Check it out!

Notes 8.0 NOMAD

According to IBM Technote 1265230, "Notes on a Stick" will be supported for the Basic configuration in 8.0. They hope to allow the Standard version to run from a stick in a later release (threads in the Public Beta forum mention 8.0.1). I can't imagine that Standard would run too well from a USB drive, though.

But, I guess we'll find out in a couple of days if Basic runs well on a stick.

Quickr and Sametime Presence Awareness Issue Resolved

Nathan and I wracked our brains over this issue! We could get presence awareness going for about 30 seconds and then it would go away. Well today we got past that in the strangest fashion...

The basic setup was a Windows Server 2003 box running MS Virtual Server with a Quickr VM and a Sametime (7.5.1 CF1) VM. Nothing earth shattering. We decided to re-allocate that server for an installation of Lotus Connections, so I shutdown the VMs and moved them to another server (same OS). It was actually the same hardware specs but with less RAM (Connections needs the RAM!)

After bringing up the Quickr and Sametime VMs on the other server, presence awareness was working like a champ! Never saw that one coming!

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.

Happy Anniversary!!

Just want to wish a Happy Seventh Anniversary to my wife Jen! The traditional gift for 7 years is wool or copper and the modern gift is a desk set. Wonder if the desk she got along with our new bedroom suite counts towards this? ;) We've been together nearly 10 years now!! It's been a great road so far with two wonderful kids and many life changes. It's sure to be an exciting future too!

Love You Honey!!!

Curiosity Killed The Cat

But not Curious Mitch. In my thread asking for new bloggers, Mitch Cohen pointed me to his blog (mostly related to Quickr and Sametime). It's been a good read and he's fairly active. And since I've been working with Quickr lately, it's very timely.

Also, don't miss Bob Baehr's blog. He already has a countdown to Lotusphere 2008 - 177 days from now if you're wondering. We're now closer to LS08 than to LS07!

Can't Delete Person from NAB? (SnTT)

So, after upgrading a server from 5.0.2b to 7.0.2FP2 this week (the clients were 4.6.7!), I did a lot of cleanup and added the LocalDomainAdmins group. I know for a fact that at one point I renamed in ACLs the old admin groups as well. I was also able yesterday to delete a good many old accounts.

Well today we were unable to delete accounts. So I did the usual ACL checks on the NAB and even explicitly added my account. Everything was cool, but I got an error that I wasn't authorized to perform the operation (clicking the "Delete Person" button).

No errors in log. Nothing on the console. Nothing in DDM. Nothing but an error. So I go into Full Access Administration. Nothing. So then I decided to check Admin4.nsf ACL. Sure enough, LocalDomainAdmins was NOT in there! I know it was because I was looking through catalog.nsf verifying things yesterday.

But, I was then able to delete an account. And I also added LocalDomainAdmins to every db....

Now Playing: "Insanity" by Firewind

Technorati: Show-n-tell thursday

More Than Meets The Eye!

Just got back from catching Transformers!!! Excellent movie... You have to see it in the theater, though, unless you have a big screen tv - but that may not do it justice either. The AV sequencing was amazing. It was a great unwinding for today...

If you want a ringtone, check out this page with some transformers mp3 tones. The "transforming sound.mp3" is a cool one for a message alert... :)

Linux NSD Tip

Generally with the Linux NSD files you will find the "Input arguments" line with the -crashpid and -crashtid. For example:

Input arguments : -batch -crashpid 4459 -crashtid 134 -wrapper

Of course you can find out which process is running by searching for just the pid number compared to the processes listed in the Notes Process Summary section:

notes R .. 3347 3337 -bash -c /Domino/lotus/bin/server
notes R ... 3568 3347 /Domino/lotus/notes/latest/linux/server
...
notes R .... 4459 3568 /Domino/lotus/notes/latest/linux/http

So we've already determined that the http task was the crashing process. But here's another handy search:

crashpid:crashtid

Just put in the crashpid# then a colon followed by the crashtid# (Note that if the tid# is 3 digits that there should be 1 space between the colon and the tid. If the tid is 2 digits there would be two spaces - basically it's expecting up to 4 digits for the tid# with the leading digits being spaces instead of zeroes). This should help out in finding a db that may have caused it.

In this instance we would search the NSD for: 4459: 134

When that string is found, then you know that you're looking at the actual crash thread for the crashing process. For instance, you may see the following section:

/Domino/notesdata/Path/DB.nsf
Version = 43.0
SizeLimit = 0, WarningThreshold = 0
ReplicaID = 0x85256e42:0x034ece60
bContQueue = NSFPool [ 0006dc45]
Offline = No
DeleteInProgress = No
FDGHandle = 0xf024057a, RefCnt = 9, Dirty = Y
SemContQueue ( RWSEM:#0:0x029d) rdcnt=-1, refcnt=0 Writer=[ : 0], n=0, wcnt=-1, Users=-1, Owner=[ : 0]
By: [ http:4459: 90] DBH= 311, User=Imperial
...
By: [ http:4459: 134] DBH= 371, User=CN=User Name/O=Org

So, with this tip, you are able to determine that something in the Path/DB.nsf application was the cause of the server crash.

Technorati: Show-n-tell thursday

Where Are The New Bloggers?

I've been thinking and it's been a while since I've seen some new faces in the Lotus Blogging community...

With that being said, I would like to welcome two new bloggers.

The first is Michael Smelser. He's a colleague of mine here at Lotus 911 and makes the 5th Blogger here!! It looks like Mike may be focusing on dev - looking forward to it.

Also, let me introduce you to Bryan Kuhn. He's a former colleague of mine and he's been updating his blog a little more lately. Bryan focuses on BES and Dev (though not at the same time) at his blog.

Also, Ed Brill (and others) linked to two new sites in the past week - LotusViralMarketing.com and FastNSF.com, so check em out if you haven't already.

Anyone else out there have a new blog and just starting up? Would love to hear from you!

Top 5 Side 1 Track 1 - My list

OK, so I've been tagged to list my favorite 5 album openers. Hmmmmm....

Virtue and Vice - Holy Soldier's Last Train - 1992 - Awesome opener for H5 dealing with the inner struggle of good and bad in us all. This is probably one of my all-time favorite albums too!

Paradigm Shift - Liquid Tension Experiment's self-titled album - 1998 - LTE was actually my first taste of Dream Theater. Crazy, right?

Where Moth and Rust Destroy - Tourniquet's Where Moth and Rust Destroy - 2003 - I really dig their older speed/thrash stuff, but I'm more into their newer sound and this song really defines that for me.

Surfing With The Alien - Joe Satriani's Surfing With The Alien - 1987 - Amazing song followed by stellar album that still defines Satch!

Welcome To The Jungle! - Guns 'N Roses Appetite For Destruction - 1987 - Not only was this the Side 1 Track 1, but it was Disc 1 for them too. Truly definitive song followed by other songs that are GnR!

OK, so I need to tag 5 others. Not sure who's been tagged (I've only seen Nathan and John's posts on this), so here we go. I'll even go outside the Notes community some to start this up for others... :)

Phil Randolph
Bryan Kuhn (no, you can't pick Every Rose by GnR!! ;) )
Jen Whisonant
Jen Wade
Greg Simmons

Technorati: Top5Side1Track1List

Start 'Em Young!

otibm, originally uploaded by topherssgtp.

Just thought I'd share this pic of little OT wearing his IBM bib! Never too young to start, eh? :)

Notes Client Debugging Parameters

I like to dump this section of parameters into my Notes Client notes.ini file. It's all commented out and you can just remove the semi-colons as needed to enable more or additional logging. If you can think of any other options let me know, but this is a good base.

;-------------------------------------------
;-------------------------------------------
;-----Notes Client Debugging Parameters-----
;Console_LogLevel=2
;LOG_SESSIONS=1
;LOG_CONNECTIONS=1
;DEBUG_TCP_ALL=1
;CLIENT_CLOCK=1
;CONSOLE_LOG_ENABLED=1
;DEBUG_CONSOLE=1
;-------------------------------------------
;-------------------------------------------

p.s. - I'm doing this as much for my record in case I need to debug a remote client I can just hit my blog for this reference... :)

Me as a Simpsons Character

Since everyone else is doing it, here's what I guess I would look like...lol


Go here to get your own Simpsons avatar.

Nickname Too Funny To Pass By...

LOL, I just saw that Rush is referring to my (soon-to-be-ex)* Senator from SC as "Lindsey Grahamnesty"... Too funny! He should continue with his former nickname and call him "Veep Lindsey Grahamnesty"!

* By this, I not only mean that he will no longer be my Senator because I'm a GA resident but that I doubt he will be re-elected in SC.

Now Playing: "Secret Ambition" by David Crowder Band: Cover of Michael W. Smith song

One Down, One To Go

So I guess I'm officially "homeless" for a couple of days as we have closed on the sale of our house in SC yesterday and will be closing down here in GA tomorrow!! What a relief... On Tuesday all of our worldly belongings were packed onto a moving truck (except, of course, for my guitars!!) and will be unloaded on Saturday.

I've been using Quickr some - so cool! Just trying to trap for whether a document is being checked-in for a placebot notification agent. But I don't think this is exactly possible within a placebot...

Now Playing: "Go West Young Man" by All Star United: Cover of Michael W. Smith song.

Every Boat Needs A Name, Right?

boat, originally uploaded by topherssgtp.

I think the name of this boat says it all. It was a great laugh driving down 85 to GA on Sunday!!

Song Redux

One of my favorite bands is Holy 5oldier! I really wish they would put out some new music. Anyway, back in 1995 they released "Promise Man" and they covered Larry Norman's (father of Christian rock) "Why Don't You Look Into Jesus" from 1972.

Well I found copies of both on Youtube, so enjoy.

Here's Larry Norman's (The volume is really low on this recording though):


Here's Holy 5oldier's much more modern redux:


And here's a sample of why I really dig H5. Great music and powerful lyrics in this song!! Their original vocalist, Steven Patrick, is amazing. Does anyone out there have a copy of his solo project Red Reign? I have to find that...:

Great Dinner With Family In NH

I've been working with a client in NH this week and decided to give a call to my wife's uncle Dennis and his wife Linda. They live in Maine only about an hour away from where I am. So I called them up on Tuesday and they called me back yesterday and said they would love to come meet me tonight. I believe I have only met them once at our wedding almost 7 years ago. It was really great to hang out with them. They are involved with their music ministry in their church, so we were able to hit it off talking about that. They're a great couple and really exhibit what Christianity is about (James 1:27). They have taken many kids under their wings - specifically some that may have lost parents when they were young (the orphans) as well as doing some foster care. I really had an awesome time with them!!

Great NOMAD Tip

Judging from my Google hits, I seem to be the Nomad expert. Googling Lotus Notes Nomad yields my review as the #2 site after IBM. So I thought I would follow up with a way I've been using it now as a consultant.

First of all, Nomad is intended to provide USB stick access to the Notes client and it's great. However, you can also install multiple instances of Nomad on larger drives, shares, or local drives. You can check out the full installation procedure from the link to my review above, but below is a modified version that will allow you to have separate Nomad installs for multiple customers (or other needs). This keeps you from having multiple location documents and dealing with cross certificates, etc... It would require you to have about 400 MB free space for each install as well as a bare-bones installation that you would need to use later. Below is a modified installation process.

1. Insert the USB drive into the USB port on your computer and create a "NOMAD\base" folder. This can also be performed somewhere on your local disk. (i.e. C:\NOMAD\base)
2. Make note of the drive letter that is assigned to the USB drive.
3. Extract the C94QIEN.exe file. This is the filename of the self-extracting executable downloaded from IBM. This is just the Notes Client. (The C94QAEN.exe is the Full Client package with Admin and Designer - you can alternatively extract this file.)
4. In a command prompt window, navigate to the folder where you extracted the C94QIEN file (there should now be a setup.exe), and then enter this command to install Lotus Notes on the USB drive:
setup /a /v"NOMAD=1 TARGETDIR=F:\NOMAD\base\ /qb+"
Where F is the drive letter.
The parameters /qb+ allow for the display of the basic user interface and a message box at the end of the upgrade. Don't forget the last quotation mark!
5. Perform the post-install cleanup (from my original review) to free up space.
6. The \base folder now has a copy of the Nomad installation. You can run Notes from here, but I use it to keep a copy of the files.
7. Create a folder \NOMAD\CustomerX.
8. Copy and paste the entire contents of the \NOMAD\Base folder into the \NOMAD\CustomerX folder. This step can be repeated for each customer!!
9. Open the \NOMAD\CustomerX folder and edit the autorun.ini file. You will need to modify the path for the MSI_LOCATION= and MSI_COMMANDLINE= (including the DATADIR= part of this line) options. You will see that they may have F:\NOMAD\Base\... Simply modify this to be the CustomerX path. Save and close the autorun.ini file.
10. The \NOMAD\CustomerX\autorun.inf and \NOMAD\CustomerX\Program Files\Lotus\Notes\notes.ini files will also need to be modified to match the path.
11. Run the command AUTORUN.EXE from the root of any of the CustomerX folders by double-clicking on the filename or by typing the command on the command line. OR
12. Alternatively, create a shortcut to the nlnotes.exe and just run this.

This can provide a good deal of flexibility and gives you a clean Notes install for each customer!

In Honor Of The Silver Surfer Movie

Since it's coming out in theaters today, I believe I will be spinning this album on my iPod for a while!

surfingwithalien, originally uploaded by topherssgtp.

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... :)

Great Weekend With Family

On Thursday night my wife and our 3 year old came to Kennesaw to look at houses with our wonderful realtor, Myra Brown! She's been extremely helpful! Anyway, I believe we have narrowed the field to just a few and are working on a contract for one! I knew once SWMBO (she who must be obeyed) came to look that she would be able to find what "we" needed... ;) She's on her way back now and I had a tremendously great time with them. We decided that house hunting wouldn't be too easy with a 3 month old, so it'll be about 2 weeks until I see OT when I head to Rock Hill this weekend. Till then I'll be hanging out in some free wi-fi spots... This Starbucks isn't too bad and the Strawberries & Cream was great for this hot day!

lol, I just overheard a lady say "There are things on that iPod I should be made fun of for, but that's not one of them!" Hope they don't look through mine... By the way, the new Dream Theater album is great and has been spinning a lot on my iPod this week. And I think I'm going to order the Rush of Fools disc. Should have done that while I was sitting here - duh! OK, I'm rambling - catch you all later!

For Those Of You Who Embed YouTube Videos...

Hat tip to the desiringGod blog for this one.

Because of a new YouTube feature, when you embed a video, your users can watch related videos on your site. This is, of course, risky for anyone who wants to be in control of the content of their site. (Wouldn't that be everyone?)

If you want to, you can disable it by adding &rel=0 to the end of the video's URL when you embed it.

That can be kind of scary if something "related" isn't exactly what you wanted to have other people see when at your site. Just the other night while at a Barnes & Noble looking at a magazine I saw where a seemingly orthodox preacher in New England somewhere (I think) was actually fired because of some links from his personal web site. It turns out that he had some links to some occult sites so that people could get information about certain groups. But from just a couple of clicks people at his site could order shirts, etc... from these groups. It appears that the church he was at saw this as something they didn't want visitors to their pastor's site to be able to do so easily.

The moral is, along with the YouTube issue above, that you should probably be aware of what you're linking to and what people may perceive about you.

Now Playing: "Repentance" by Dream Theater

Great First Week

Thanks to those of you who emailed or pinged me about my first week at Lotus 911! It went well - just getting accustomed to things and jumping in where I can. The team is awesome! Of course you all know about Nathan and Tim, but they're just the tip of the iceberg (pun intended!) there. I know I have a lot to learn from everyone and I'm glad to be able to dive right in. It's like a cool geek family (and it's wild knowing that if I need to ask Nathan or Tim something that I can just walk over to their stations - a little surreal).

On the personal front, it's a little tough being away from Jen and the kids during the week until we can all get back under the same roof, but we've seen some great "God things" happening that I hope to write about soon... They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and I'm really beginning to see that. It's kind of wild.

I'll try not to be so slack here at the blog, but I've said that before!

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!

Sametime 7.5.1 Information Center

I have always* found the System i Information Center to be extremely helpful with information about the System i platform. In case you've missed it, there is now a Sametime 7.5.1 Information Center. It appears to be something that all Sametime admins can use for some great information.

* - OK, for those of you who used the i Info. Center before around V5R2, it was pretty bad. But after they got rid of the slow java menus and cleaned it up some more it is much better.

Congrats To The Moodys!

This weekend Chris Moody (the perpetual bridesmaid!)and Lottie got married! Congrats you two!! Here's a link to the Flickr tag I posted and below are three pics I really like followed by some stories.


Chris and Lottie's First Dance


Lottie, Chris, Jen, and Me (After an ordeal with getting Cocky to the wedding in humid Columbia, I changed out of the tux...)


Lottie, Cocky (Go Gamecocks!), and Chris

I've known Chris for about 10 years now! I remember him and Seth Dean coming into FCA their freshman year of college when I was helping out with worship. We lived in the same house my senior year. I had to be on campus early for BSU and was one of the few there when Chris came up early too. I helped him move in and we became really good friends that year. I put in a good word for him and we've been working together for the past 5.5 years and we've been really close the whole time. I'll miss him with the move, but I'm sure we'll be back up this way pretty frequently and will hang out with the Moodys.

This entire weekend was amazing. It was like a mini college reunion. We just had a wonderful time and I won't bore you with all of the details. It was a little sad too because I won't be seeing most of these friends for a long time. One of the highlights was being asked to play guitar accompanied by Billy Robinson. I've never actually played a wedding and we had to talk Billy out of retirement! Billy and I go way back - we were friends in high school and college roommates for 3 years! Who knows when we'll get to perform together again? :( He did a great job with the song and I believe I did too... :) It was a privilege to play for the Moodys on this most special day of their lives as they took communion together for the first time as husband and wife.

I guess about now they are in or nearing Hawaii - he pinged me to say they had a missed layover and were put about 4 hours back... Poor kids! It'll be worth it, I'm sure!

We love you guys!!! Congratulations again!!!!

My Big News!

As I've hinted at, I have some huge, exciting news to share!!

Beginning on May 29 I will start my new job with Lotus 911 as a Lotus Consultant!!! Thanks for the warm welcome Nathan!

This is a wonderful opportunity for my family and me. It will be a major shift for me moving from a position as an Admin/Developer for 7 years with a private sector company to a Consultant position. I am really looking forward to the challenge of that change as well as working with some great talent and wonderful folks!

My family will be in a transitional phase for a while as we will be moving from Rock Hill, SC to Kennesaw, GA. In honor of this and through peer pressure, my wife, Jen, has also started a blog! As a bit of background, I have always had the nickname "Nut" because of my last name. With that said, my wife's blog is "The Nut House" and as she posted in her first post, "watch out Bulldogs - family of nuts and Gamecock fans headed your way!"

Won't Be Making It to The VIEW 2007....

I was hoping to meet a lot of you there, but I won't be able to make it. More on that very soon!!! Big changes coming my way... :)

Sametime 7.5.1 Upgrade Failed

Guess I'll try again another day... I was upgrading on an i5/OS V5R4 box from 7.5 CF1. When I started it back up I got a "Meeting Server: Child Process Died". There were about 2 hits on the Lotus Support site that seemed to be close, but neither of the solutions worked. Well, one was to reinstall PASE but I was not at the server to load a CD and that didn't appear to be the problem anyway. I started the whole process at about 8:55 and was starting it back up initially at about 9:00. After looking into the error for a bit I called Lotus support and waited 30 minutes before even speaking to a human. I hung up with them after specifying a priority 1 (server down) and being told it was callback. This was about 10:30. At 11:00 I decided to uninstall 7.5.1 and reinstall 7.5. I'm back up now and haven't heard back from Lotus and the whole "up to 2 hours for a callback" wasn't floating my boat on something that should have only taken 10 minutes... :)

Have You Offset Your Carbon?

It seems that the latest rage is "carbon offsetting". This is where you can buy a credit (around $50 per year per vehicle) and something environmentally friendly will be done with that money (like planting a tree or preserving current forestation). Al Gore does offsets, so I guess anyone who wants to "live green" should be OK doing it too, right? :)

According to the Save the Planet website, six 25-year old pine trees can absorb 1 ton of CO2.

About 20 years ago, we planted about 1,000 pine trees on my parents' property:



This means that (when they are 25) they will absorb 166 tons of CO2 annually. My sedan accounts for about 4.6 tons and our SUV accounts for about 6.6 tons. So at 6 tons average per vehicle (depending on mileage, of course), the 1,000 trees we planted are more than covering the carbon footprint for all vehicles in my family. Actually, this covers about 27 vehicles per year until the trees are gone!

I just feel really good about myself knowing that I'm "green" as far as my vehicles go.... Hopefully you can see the humor in this - if not, then go out and find 6 pine trees to call your own so that you can live green too. That's a whole lot cheaper than buying a "green" car and it's officially sanctioned by our former VP!

Speaking of "green", I saw a car the other week with one of the "Live Green" banners on the bumper. Was it a Prius? Nope. It was a 1995 Mustang GT - the little V8 must be green, eh? ;) Maybe the lady found some pine trees!

Updated Sandbox Application

One of the first applications I downloaded from the Sandbox was the "Staff Whereabouts". It's basically an in-out board to see the status of a workgroup. We actually got the application to replace an AS/400 based! signout application. I have commented at the sandbox that I have reworked the ui and have web-enabled the application. I actually web-enabled it a while back. We only have one or two people that may use it on the web, so not much time was invested in it (it's mostly if you need to signout in a pinch). But about a month ago I completed changed the colors of the ui. It could stand for a complete overhaul, so forgive me if it still looks like a Notes application. :)

Here's what it looks like now:



If anyone's interested, post a comment. I don't want to link directly from here since it's not really my application.

Bella (The Movie)

Thursday night at the Thirsty07 Conference, we were treated to a screening of the movie Bella. Described at the website as "a heartwarming story about friendship, family and our capacity for love in the face of the unexpected," this film was the 2006 winner of the Toronto Film Festival. This puts it in some great company of past winners.

This is possibly the most moving film I've seen since "The Passion of the Christ." But don't just shrug it off as a "Christian" movie just because it was screened at Thirsty (or because I'm writing about it). It really is about our "capacity to love" and all people will benefit from it. The friendship between Jos and Nina is challenged and the way that they make it through is truly amazing and inspirational. I don't want to really talk about it here because the plot would be ruined. I will say, though, that this film has been worth it because two lives have already been saved!!

My Donation To The Lotus Museum

I "donated" the picture of Notes "Express", Release 3.30 for OS/2. Thankfully, I don't have to manage any more OS/2 boxes!

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

Lotus Museum

If you're in the mood to check out some of the history of Lotus, check out the new Lotus Museum. I've already made a donation and am waiting for it to show up online. I'm relatively new to Lotus, so this is a great site for me to brush up on some history.

I'm digging the Nurf Football and the Sametime Coaster is pretty nice! But the Captain's Hat is maybe the sweetest item!

So little time...

Heading to Alpharetta Tomorrow for Thirsty!

I'll be heading to Thirsty 2007 tomorrow with my wife and our worship leader, his wife, and their daughter. We went last year and it was awesome. It's a really refreshing conference with a tremendous focus on Worship. Can't wait!

I'll have my corporate mail off, so gmail me if you want at chris.whisonant.

Now Playing: "Peace" by Third Day

eBibleicious

I've added the eBibleicious script to my blog. This means that any scripture references will automatically be hyperlinked. I have chosen to use the ESV Translation that will display in a window when you hover the mouse. Check out these:

John 1:1
John 21:25
Acts 8:20-24

LCTY in Raleigh Yesterday

I was able to make it to the Lotusphere Comes To You event hosted by Lotus 911 yesterday in Raleigh, NC. I was able to meet Nathan and Tim. During the morning session, there was a meeting/revival being held by American Baptist churches. It's a historically black denomination, so there was some soul filled (and filling) gospel music going on next door during the morning sessions. Good stuff!

The Lotus information was really good as well. I'm guessing there were about 40-50 people there in the morning session. Nathan asked how many of them had downloaded the Notes 8 client and maybe a dozen raised their hands! This was great - especially compared to the ONE person he said raised a hand at the Hartford event earlier in the week. As an admin, there is some great stuff coming in Domino 8 and Domino "Next". In Domino "Next", you can get rid of Notes ID files if you wish and potentially even authenticate against AD or LDAP.

I had to straighten Nathan out once after a session. There were a couple of ladies who were not Notes customers and Nathan confused them by referring to a Notes "Application" as a "Database"! What were you thinking?!? :)

Quickr integration is going to be excellent - check out this video.

Now Playing: "Dirty Pool" by Stevie Ray Vaughan

I'm A Soccer Monster

EG "The Soccer Monster", originally uploaded by topherssgtp.

Yesterday Emma Grace and I got out her soccer ball. She kept running around saying "I'm a soccer monster." I had no clue where she got that, but after googling the phrase, it turns out it's from The Backyardigans. We had a blast!!

Unresponsive Sametime Server And Its Effect On Other Servers

Right when we were about to leave yesterday, we got two helpdesk calls. One was from a user who couldn't open a document in a web app. The second was from a user who couldn't open DWA. So, we asked if it was OK for me to look at the code for the app (there was what appeared to be a JS error from the onload event) and we had the DWA user login to the old school webmail. Two random calls, right?

When I got home I was paged with a problem that nobody could get into DWA. So I tried and it didn't work for me either. Just a white screen trying to load. The first rule of server troubleshooting is to check the console. So, I did this and I saw this message sporadically: "Error connecting to server IM/ORG: Remote system no longer responding". Well, I know that DWA has integrated chat and I recalled that as my Notes 8 Basic was shutting down at the office the "Connecting..." message was in my Sametime status. I didn't think anything of it at the time - I thought it was just because I was closing the client. But at home I checked the console of the Sametime server. Everything seemed fine. All of the tasks were running, but we couldn't talk to it from other servers. So I shut down that Domino partition and viola!, DWA began working. I fired Sametime back up and it was all good.

I later recalled that the web app also uses STLinks to allow chatting with the document owner. So, this unresponsive Sametime server caused DWA to fail as well as web apps using STLinks. Gotta love it!

BES Down - EVERYWHERE

In case you haven't heard, this may keep some of you BES admins from troubleshooting today. Last night the entire BES infrastructure went down...

And it's still down as of this posting! At least it appears to be for us.

A Milestone for Ollie

Congrats to my 1 month old. At 11 pounds, he has now surpassed my Les Paul's weight of 10 Pounds! :)

Speaking of Ollie, here's a recent picture of him doing what he does best...

Ollie Sleeping (1 Month), originally uploaded by topherssgtp.

What's Up In Lotus Land?

It's been a while since I've posted anything about Lotus. We're actually not doing a lot of exciting stuff with Lotus right now - as far as projects go. Our main project is just System i-related. We're migrating our user base from 5250 to Webfacing. Should be loads of fun! It will be a big adjustment for the users. We're running very well on our new System i - great performance!! Once we get all System i users to the web, we will move them into an LPAR on the same box as our Domino server.

I've been using the Notes 8 client all the time. Even NOMAD (though it's not "supported" yet, you can manually run nlnotes.exe as long as you make sure the 3rd line in the notes.ini points to the proper drive letter).

I've posted 17 main topics in the Beta forum. That's about the 7th most main topic posts from what I can count. There are no gotchas for my environment yet. Though I'm waiting on more feedback on a line that crashes the client when opening a datab....umm, application, and I've been assured that an install issue will be corrected. There is a lot of great feedback in the forum if you haven't been able to keep in the loop.

A few cool things I've seen in 8 are:
- Tabbed chatting with embedded Sametime 7.5.1 (should be in the connect client build too). Some known ui issues with it, but it works - tabbed chatting was one of the first things I thought would have been in 7.5.
- Mail template - beautiful!
- DWA 8 - the UI parity with the mail template is much better. It looks a lot more like the Notes client than previous iterations.
- Productivity Tools - these are very nice to have right from the client. Hopefully in the 8.0.1 timeframe they will be more of the Office killer that they have the potential to become. There are a few things that were already being addressed before Beta 2 was even released.
- ALT-F-T-D ('nuff said, right Nathan?) OK, so this isn't "cool", but leave this keyboard combination to the professionals! It's not your mother's ALT-F-T-D
- I also love that the spare memory in my computer is now being more fully utilized! ;)

States I've Visited

Looks like I need to get out west a little more. In June I'll be making it to Boston, so Massachusetts will be checked off... And I have a feeling that I may make it to Texas sometime to visit friends. Well, my wife will make it sometime probably.



create your own personalized map of the USA
or write about it on the open travel guide

If I Was There

One of my favorite Tourniquet songs is "If I Was There". I always wanted to perform it in church with a video or images from Good Friday. Back in college, I sang this song and played the electric lead at the end while the other BSU worship leader played the acoustic. Today I stumbled upon a moving YouTube video with footage from The Passion of The Christ.

Chris Said What I Was About To Post This Morning...

Trackback to Chris Byrne's post Should Imus Be Fired? He said basically what I have been looking for time to post. Specifically, being so close to North Carolina, I want to know when the demagogues will be coming back to apologize to the exonerated Duke students. Now I don't need to find much time to post because Chris pretty much said what I feel and more. Good post!

People Who Went To My College

I thought I would fill you in on a couple of people from my Alma Mater - North Greenville University (it was a College when I graduated in 2000). The first two have made a bit of news recently and the last few are more personal...

First, Chris Sligh, of this season's American Idol attended North Greenville. We wish him the best in his musical career. I'm sure that American Idol will be a huge step in his career.

Second, and of greater global importance than a singer (no offense, Chris), is Mike McConnell. Who is this? He's the man who, on February 20, was sworn in by President Bush as the second ever Director of National Intelligence. Under the Clinton Administration, he was director of the NSA. Of course, he attended NGC in the 60's (64 I think) when it was a Junior College.

Third are Jake and Jen Wade. We all attended NGC at the same time but were only acquaintances (and it was before they were "Jake and Jen" too). On April 1, Jen went to be stationed with Jake - who joined the Army last year. My wife and I were able to become really great friends with them when we started going to church with them in February, 2005. We will miss them deeply, but we know that God has a great plan for them. It will be tough being so far away from great friends (especially for my wife and Jen), but our friendship will be stronger than the miles.

Finally, Jon Barbee was my suite-mate for 2 years at NGC. He's just accepted the call as a youth pastor at a church here in Rock Hill. So it will be great to have him and his wife Brandy (also an alum) move up here! He started on April 1.

That's all for now!

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... :)

Another Moody Picture

Sorry pal, you opened yourself up to this one. I would like to introduce the next in a series of Moody photos... Except this one didn't require photshopping!
I now present to you... Chris Moody with his manbag (it's even pink!):

Pics from G307!

IMG00263, originally uploaded by topherssgtp.

Unfortunately, I couldn't take my camera in, but I did have my Pearl! So, here are some pics. These were the best of the best. This picture is of Satch, Gilbert, and Petrucci jamming in their collaborative set. It was an amazing show!! Mike Portnoy played drums for Petrucci and Dave LaRue was on bass for Petrucci and Satch. I think Petrucci said it best when he introduced LaRue and Portnoy - even though there are only three of them on stage, LaRue and Portnoy made it sound like a train was coming through! When Satch played "Satch Boogie" a guy beside me said that he's been waiting 20 years to hear that song live! So it sounds like Satch hasn't come to this area in a LONG time - I'm so glad I was able to witness this! Great show guys!!

The entire photo set can be found here.

Taking Dad's Car to G3!

Should be a fun trip on this beautiful day in SC in this little car... :)

Got My PCLP!

I guess it's actually my "IBM Certified Advanced System Administrator - Lotus Notes and Domino 7". I finally took the "Notes/Domino 7 Configuring Domino Web Servers" exam this morning! So that's out of my way now. I put off taking it for a while for some reason...

In other news, it's been rather slow on the Lotus front for me. I've been testing out the Notes 8 Client a good bit and have found a couple of minor issues with some custom apps in our shop. I just found out that an SPR was created on one of the issues I reported. Overall, it's really great! I even like the "old school" Notes 8 Basic edition. It has some nice updates to graphics, etc... The new personal address book template is really clean too! Very nice.

Pic of the day

We're all doing great!!!

I Was Quoted In Computerworld

I'm quoted in the Computerworld article "Notes fans hope upgrade ends e-mail client's ugly-duckling status". Update: In my earlier haste, I forgot to mention that Nathan Freeman and John Head were also quoted in the article.

At the point of the article when the apparently poor performance of the Outlook 2007 client is being mentioned, they put in the following quote from me:

Chris Whisonant, a senior systems administrator at Comporium Communications, a telecommunications service provider in Rock Hill, S.C., said the increased functionality in Notes 8 means that the upgrade "does use more RAM than before." But Whisonant said that Notes 8 "is easy to get used to because you just like using it more."

I did say that more RAM is used, but only in passing. In fact, that was possibly the only negative statement I made in my e-mail to Computerworld. Note 8 is very impressive - both the Basic and Standard clients. Sure there is more overhead, but there is a ton more functionality! It's a great article for Notes. I just wish that they had put the short paragraph I sent them about performance instead of just the sentence. Here's what I sent them:

Even though this is still a beta (please keep that in mind) with debug code and some kinks to work out, it still runs very well and I haven't noticed too much of a difference from my 7.0.2 client I previously had installed. But it does use more RAM than before. At the same time, it has a lot more functionality so that offsets the jump in system requirements.

Notes 8 should be a great .0 release after some more tweaking. If you want to see some of the other things I've written about the client, check out some of my posts at the Public Beta forum.

Welcome Oliver Thomas!!

Ollie was born at 11:54 today. He was 8 pounds 9 ounces and 22 inches! Mom and baby are great!

Happy Pi Day

Todays date is 3.14, at least in America, for those of you who do dates wrong, happy 14.3 day!

Gmail Down?

My wife was complaining that her gmail is down too, so I tried their SSL version:

https://mail.google.com/mail/

This takes a little longer to load and you'll have to accept a certificate, but it lets us in...

Sola Scriptura by Neal Morse

The new Neal Morse album, Sola Scriptura, is nothing less than spectacular. It's based off the life of Martin Luther - the title is one of the "Solas" of the Reformation meaning that "Only Scripture" should be our guide. The back of the CD insert has the Latin text of the first 6 phrases of Luther's 95 Theses. Before getting into the musical aspects of this album, I would like to post some of the lyrics that really stand out to me. First, Jeff posted the tracks back in January. There are only 4 tracks on this epic:

* The Door (29:14)
* The Conflict (25:00)
* Heaven In My Heart (5:11)
* The Conclusion (16:34)

The Content
Some lyrics from the section "Mercy for Sale" in "The Door" really get to the heart of what Martin Luther was battling - especially with Indulgences:

In the name of God you must pay your penance
If you don't well that's a crime
If you want to buy your way to heaven
We'll indulge you every time

Also from "Upon The Door" in the same track, we have:

Sometimes comes a moment when there is no escape
A man by candlelight reads "The just shall live by faith"
And a rushing ray of light comes and hits him at the core
I will write my words upon the door

History is hinged on him playing out the role
The dawn is coming after the dark night of the soul
This simple act has changed our world forever more
I will write my words upon the door
I will write my words upon the door

In the section "Underground" in "The Conflict", we have the following - and we should all be thankful that Luther translated the Bible into German because that opened the way for us to have English Bibles:

I thought I was coming to die
And that's what they're thinking outside
But I will stay lost
'Til it's safe there to be found

Writing the book in the day
In words that my people can say
Here I will stay tucked away
I'm underground

And I'll just leave you with the section "In Closing" from "The Conclusion":

God can change the world with just one willing soul
Who will stand up for the truth and give him a starring role
So come in to the fullness and open up the door
Maybe it is you he's looking for
Maybe it is you he's looking for......

The Music
If you're familiar with Neal Morse's prior works, this is very much like those. "The Door" starts off with heavy keys and then gets into the powerful lyrics. Mike Portnoy's drumming is awesome throughout and the fills he adds really make the songs. As I mentioned in my previous post about G307, Paul Gilbert is really amazing with his solos. The fills at about 16:00 into "The Conflict" and the solo at 27:00 in are superb! After the powerful first song that's over 29 minutes, one feels like an entire album has been covered with the various styles. And then "The Conflict" starts with a really crunchy guitar intro. Then the usual prog-rock style comes back and about 14:00 in we come to an amazing flamenco classical guitar part delivered by Gilbert. The next song "Heaven In My Heart" could almost be a radio song if it could be separated from the remainder of the album. It's still a really good prog song but it's fairly slow. With so many different sections in the first 2 songs, we've already run the gamut from fast to slow, heavy to soft, and even classical. It's extremely eclectic! "The Conclusion" starts off with "Randy's Jam" - a bass led section featuring Randy George. It's pretty wild - I need to listen to it on my system with a subwoofer! The rest of the album continues the theme of great rocking prog!

Like I said earlier, this album is really spectacular and you should check it out! At the end of the liner notes we find this from Neal:

Also, I am not trying to point to only one church that needs to be reformed, but rather that we should ALL look at the scriptures afresh to see what truth God wants to restore in THIS generation! If Luther brought back salvation by faith; the Wesleys brought sanctification, and the Pentecostals restored the baptism of the Holy Ghost, what is there for US to restore? Remember, the latter house shall be greater than the former!

Satriani, Petrucci, and Gilbert - G307

I just found out yesterday that G307 starts this week!! Better yet, I found out that it's coming to the House of Blues in Myrtle Beach. Since that's the weekend of our Easter production at church, I have to be at church Saturday and Sunday mornings. That means that Saturday afternoon I'm off to Myrtle Beach and then back after the show!!

Satriani has always been a guitar hero of mine. I have a number of his albums and had a cat named Satch! Petrucci is, of course, of Dream Theater fame. Just search this blog for Dream Theater and you'll see tons of posts with them in the "Now Playing" section! The OLP guitar I had was very close to Petrucci's MusicMan guitar. It wasn't the licensed Petrucci model, but I did replace the pickups with those like Petrucci used. But it's no Les Paul!! Paul Gilbert, of Mr. Big fame, has his own solo guitar album now. Oh, and he plays on Neal Morse's album (see "Now Playing"). The solo at 27 minutes into "The Door" on Sola Scriptura as well as the Flamenco section at 12 minutes into "The Conflict" on the same album both demonstrate why he's on G307! Should be an amazing show!

Now Playing: "The Conflict" by Neal Morse

Downloading Notes 8

It's going at a smooth 50 KB/sec on my cable modem and I'm only at 15%. I may get to it later! And yes, Greg, you can get a copy of it next week! :) But, wow, 638 MB for the client. Wow!

The Golf Course I Live On...

...will be no more:



It was just a 12 hole par 3 that I only played twice, but they're starting the process of tearing it down. In the top half of the picture, there used to be a lot of really big trees - they are no more! A developer is going to be putting in about 300 units. About half of the units will be townhomes, and the majority of the other houses will be around 1,500 square feet. And then about 10-20 homes that will be around 3,000 square feet. We know that 10 are supposed to back up to the homes across the street from me. These are bigger than our homes and will probably do good for our property values.

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!

Picture of the Day

I took this pic with my Pearl of a dvd-ram we opened from IBM. Notice how it is stapled... Nice QA job!

My Electric Guitars

I only have 2 electric guitars and got around to taking some decent pics the other day, so here they are!
My '04 Gibson Les Paul Standard (bought new in May '06):



My '04 Standard with her older brother - a '97 Jackson Performer PS-4 bought in December '97 (I added a Duncan 59 PAF in the neck position, Duncan George Lynch Screamin' Demon in the bridge position and a Mini Screamin' Demon in the middle position - I want to find a good single coil for the middle, though...I was experimenting with the "triple bucker" sound.)

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!

I'm going to THE VIEW Lotus Developer 2007

Who out there is going or speaking? I hope to meet up with some of you! I've never been to this conference, but I've been told that it's really great and I need a good kick in the dev... I've never been to Boston, either. That should be fun too! I'll be flying up on that Sunday afternoon.

Let me know if you're going!

500th Post!

Just saying hi! Wow, in just over 2 years I have 500 posts here. Thanks to all of my readers. I hope you have a great weekend - I get to migrate 3 Domino servers to new hardware! :)

Think Long and Hard Before Upgrading to 7.0.2 FP1

Unless you're in dire straits for some fixes in 7.0.2 FP1, I urge you to really think about whether you upgrade.

Well, that's the word on the street...

When I migrate from our old System i to our new one on Saturday, I will not be using 7.0.2FP1 with a hotfix like I have on my current box but will use 7.0.2 with my hotfix. I'll manually do the java updates for DST. I'm not one who would generally recommend to not upgrade, but in our environment it's been suggested to me on two separate support calls that I may wish to remove FP1...

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

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