The Domino Chick

Busy Busy

Wednesday, April 21st, 2004

An apology for the lack of posts recently - I've been working like crazy on about a billion projects, while also tending to some personal matters. Some highlights:

In between working on A Major Project at work the weekend before last, played tour guide for Chris when he visited L.A.; while working on said Major Project, confirmed that there is no easy way to touch archive settings for multiple users in R5, which made me really appreciate policies in 6 even more; worked on slides for my talks at Admin2004, which I'm putting the finishing touches on now; and played tour guide again for a whole slew of other friends last weekend during the Artwalk at the artists' community where I live.

I'll be back to Domino geekery as soon as possible. I need to get those presentations finished ASAP, though, so I probably won't be posting much until next week. And I'll try to have my RSS feed back up by then, too!

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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 08:21:01 AM
Location: Los Angeles, CA

Books

Thursday, April 8th, 2004

I've been looking at my library of Domino and other technical books lately. Some of them are books that I've found extremely valuable - they're dog-eared and their accompanying CD-ROMs are looking a little battered. I have others that I've purchased, thinking I'll use them extensively, and ended up giving them a cursory once-over and relegating them to the bottom bookshelf. I've been looking at them because I'm trying to determine what makes a particular book fall into the first category.

I've been thinking about this because I'm considering writing a couple of books on Domino and related technologies. I've co-authored two IBM Redbooks - one on Domino Clustering and one on QuickPlace administration and deployment. The clustering redbook hasn't been updated since 2000, so I thought there might be some interest in an updated version that details the changes between the 5.x and 6.x codestreams. I'm also considering a book on troubleshooting, but maybe I could turn that into a series of articles instead. I mean, everyone wants to read a whole chapter on parsing NSD call-stacks, right?

Another area that I'd really like to write about (and you'll most likely see me write about here) is running Domino on Linux. There has been a lot of discussion in Linux-related publications lately (see Ed's recent posts here and here), and I think a lot of organizations are considering moving to Linux as a platform for Domino. I think Linux is a fantastic platform for Domino and I'm very excited about the prospect of running a designer client on Linux - even if I have to do it under WINE - because I'd love to have all of my home machines running Linux exclusively. I know there are a couple of Redbooks out there about running Domino on Linux, but I wonder if there would be interest in additional books on the subject.

Of course, none of this will get started for a couple of months, due to the aforementioned season of conferences. I barely have time to blog, as evidenced by my dearth of posts this week. However, I'd like to know if there's any interest in books or articles on the subjects I mentioned. Just don't be surprised if I use your comments to convince an editor or two. :-)

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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 08:37:49 AM
Location: Los Angeles, CA

Seasons

Monday, April 5th, 2004

Baseball season starts today! I know our friends outside the U.S. (and many here in the States) couldn't care less, but I'm very excited. I live less than a mile from Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, and this year I think I'm going to take advantage of a coworker's season tickets and go catch a few games in the good seats.

Another season that's starting up (for me, at least) is conference season. I'm speaking at the View's Admin2004 conference in May, which I just realized is less than 6 weeks away! Then there's the Lotus Advisor Live conference in June, which I'll be attending, but not as a speaker. I'm also attending two conferences in July that aren't Domino-related - a comic book convention and a Star Trek convention - but those are almost too geeky to mention.

I mention these for two reasons - shameless self-promotion and to ask for feedback. I'm finishing up the final versions of my slide sets for my talks at the View conference. In the past, I've heard various feedback from attendees about whether they like to see live demos in the session. I'm doing four sessions this time around - Domino Clustering, Mail Monitoring, Running Domino on Linux, and Transitioning Your Skills to WebSphere. Last year, I did two clustering sessions and one mail monitoring session, but I didn't include demos for a couple of reasons. The clustering sessions would have been difficult because I couldn't guarantee a working secure internet connection back to my office, and I didn't want to bring two servers with me (unlike my friend Rob, who brought two (or was it three?) servers along with him for his QuickPlace sessions). Instead of demos, I included lots of screenshots and additonal notes in the slides.

This year, I'm planning to definitely do demos for the Running Domino on Linux session - I've got my laptop dual-booting Windoze and RedHat Linux, and switching back and forth from the laptop with the slides to the laptop running the Domino server will be simple enough. I'm again presented with a challenge for the clustering and WebSphere sessions, though, so I'm thinking that I may just include screenshots for those sessions and only do demos for the aforementioned Linux session and maybe the mail monitoring session, because I can run a Domino server locally on my laptop and I won't have to worry about any potential connectivity issues.

My question, then, is this: do you prefer sessions with live demos to ones without? If there aren't demos, are you satisfied if the session content and additional materials provided give you lots of screenshots and clear information, with tips you can apply immediately to your servers? And thirdly, if I get a lot of feedback requesting live demos, will you all talk Rob into shipping me some servers? ;-)

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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 08:18:21 AM
Location: Los Angeles, CA

To Archive, or Not to Archive

Friday, April 2nd, 2004

... that is the question.

I've been having an interesting debate with some colleagues over reducing disk space consumption. Of course, our biggest disk space consumers are mail databases. The use of the single-copy template has certainly helped, but we always get into circular arguments about other ways to force users to reduce the sizes of their mail files.

We can force users to archive using policies, but where do we place the archives? If we put them on the user's workstation, then they aren't being backed up. If we archive them to another server, then we are merely moving our disk space consumption problem to another location.

Enforcing quotas also presents an interesting set of problems. We can annoy users by reminding them that they are over quota and can't save any sent mail each time they send something, but savvy users can work around this by cc:ing themselves when they send a message. We can start holding mail for users that are over quota, but then we run the risk of having hundreds of messages sitting on the server, waiting for users to reduce the size of their databases before they can be delivered. What if 500 users are over quota at the same time? What if one of those messages is to a salesperson on the last day of the month, telling him they just need one last piece of information by 3:00 p.m. so that they can sign the contract? What if he doesn't reduce his mail database size until 3:15? We can also start rejecting inbound mail for users over quota, but I don't even want to get into the nightmare that would be for customer-facing users.

So, we've settled the debate (sort of) by deciding that forcing user behavior is not the answer - user education is the key to reducing mail database sizes. As we roll out Notes 6.5.1 to our user base, we are conducting training classes to introduce them to the new features. We've incorporated instructions on how to archive, how to delete large messages and/or remove the attachments, and emphasis on one of our favorite space-saving client features - reply without attachment. We've already noticed a shift in end user behavior and a slight reduction in mail database sizes for the people who have gone through training.

How do you manage your users' mail database sizes?

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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 10:52:45 AM
Location: Los Angeles, CA

IBM Acquires Candle Corp

Thursday, April 1st, 2004

IBM issued a press release this morning announcing its agreement to acquire Candle Corporation. Details here and here. (FYI - Both news blurbs appear to be the same).

The acquisition makes a lot of sense from both sides of the picture. Candle has always been closely aligned with IBM, and has a portfolio of systems management software that works with IBM hardware and software products. IBM has a habit of acquiring companies with a history of innovation and market leadership.

Wow, that last paragraph is just chock-full of corporate jargon. That's probably because I work for Candle, and I just got out of a corporate-wide meeting discussing the acquisition. Of course, nobody involved can really discuss the details of the acquisition publicly or with employees until the standard government regulatory approvals are completed, but as a former IBMer who has always had somewhat of a bias towards IBM and its products, I have to say I'm pretty excited about the whole thing. I really do think it'll be a good fit for both companies - as one analyst put it (and I'm paraphrasing here), Candle and IBM have been dating for 27 years - it's about time they finally tied the knot.

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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 03:08:47 PM
Location: Los Angeles, CA

Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag

Thursday, April 1st, 2004

I've been playing around with the NSD tool a lot lately - I was familiar with analyzing .rip files in R5, and I wanted to include some NSD-related content for my e-Pro webcast on Domino Server Troubleshooting last week. Now, some people may not find analyzing .rip files or NSD output very interesting, but that's the sort of supergeeky thing I like - poking around in call-stacks, trying to find the .dll or process that's hosing a server.

Now I'm troubleshooting a server crash from earlier this week, and due to log analysis and confirmation from the NSD output, I traced the problem to a third-party product that I have installed on my server. I opened a ticket with the company that makes the product, just to let them know that they've got a potential issue with their product running on 6.5 servers. They haven't certified it for 6.5.1 yet, and I want to upgrade, but I want to make sure they've got the issue fixed before I do, because I can't have random server crashes happening all the time. I suppose I can just disable the product's add-in tasks temporarily until they certify it for 6.5.1, because it's not a mission-critical app (and really, my boxen at my home office are just used for testing and my own personal fiddling, so it's not affecting a production environment). We'll see.

In the meantime, I'm going to keep analyzing those NSD logs until I am seeing call-stacks and process trees in my dreams. :)

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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 11:45:00 AM
Location: Los Angeles, CA

Welcome Aboard

Thursday, April 1st, 2004

This is a test of the emergency broadcast system.

Well, not really. It's my first post in my lovely Domino blog.

My friends have been pestering me to get my Domino blog up and running for a while now, so here it is. I'll attempt to post frequently about my adventures with Notes, Domino, QuickPlace, Sametime (I can never get used to those long names that IBM changed them to, so Sametime and QuickPlace they will remain), WebSphere, and my latest obsession, running all of them (and many other things) on Linux. Expect much geekiness and probably a lot of snarky comments in the future.

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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 10:00:00 AM
Location: Los Angeles, CA