Lotus Administration eBooks?

I was in the shower, that is where I do all of my good thinking, and I said to myself….the last great Domino Book I have is over 9 years old and a few versions back, I think version 6.

It might be high time to write a new book that  people can use. The problem is if you know the book I am talking about written one Brian Benz and Rocky Oliver called the Lotus Notes and Domino 6 Programming Bible and it’s well over 1032 pages of juicy Lotus goodness. I have one on my desk at work and one on my desk at home. Even though we are not on version 8.5.3 it’s still relevant to some extent.

I also know that Rocky and Brain slaved over this book for many many days getting to done. It was by no means easy. Still the normal book publishing community scoffs at books on or about Lotus Products. There are a few new books about this and that but nothing on the scale of THE BIBLE!

I was thinking about doing it in small easy to manage books one about each topic or section of the Administration and the server. I don’t know enough about Domino Designer to do much at all, but between the Lotus Domino Server, Lotus Notes, and the Administration Client I think there are about 20 - 30 books to be written. My feeling was to start with the easy stuff and build up but never write a book to deep so that you could pick up any of them and get something out of them. I think selling them for $1.99 or $2.99 each online would be a fair price, but I am going to need some help.

1. Would you rather be one big book for one big price?
2. or a bunch of small books for a small price?
3. Do you think there is a market for this type of info?

IBM OS/400 & Domino 8 Issues

I have been fighting a problem at my current employers environment that has been hard to diagnose. The mail servers run on IBM’s Power Platform and iOS (OS/400) V5R4. The Domino version is 8.5.1 FP4. That said you would think that everything is going to be just fine. There is plenty of memory, plenty of CPU and about 1.5TB of extra disk space. Evertyhing should be perfect, but it’s not and you know this because I would not have started out by saying I was “fighting a problem”.

What was the problem?

There are two servers. One primary and one secondary. The majority of the users would run on the primary until it crashed then as expected would jump over to the secondary. Problem was when they started to move to the secondary the server would run up 300% CPU (Which is ok in a LPAR system if you have the CPU) and eventually just crash as well leaving NO mail server, which is a bad thing.

Ater begging for help from IBM Support I finally got some answers about the issue. Seems there is a problem with OS/400 V5R4 that does not make Domino 8.5.X very happy. Seems the issue lies in the way OS/400 does a look up on the files/DBs and OS/400 adds a 4K record to every record looked up. On a server with over 5000 users and a Domino Directory with 25,000 users and 65,000 Groups that is going to get messy. So when the fail over started the server would go nuts trying to index, compact, failover and do lookups to make sure everything was right and going into this spiral of doom eventually crashing. You add 4K to every record, every lookup and every little document while it is failing over and you get all kinds of issues.

So not only was my primary down, not my secondary was down as well.

So with both server down a few questions come up;

1 . Why and 2. When can we move to Exchange.

Answers;

1. I am working on it and 2. Never!

I am still looking for the IBM Article that shows the problem. I will try to contact IBM Support again this weekend get it. I am sure some of you want to know more.

The fix is simple (I use the term loosley) upgrade the OS to V6R1 or V7R1 and it fixes the problem. But in a big IT environment it’s not that easy. So I have spent the past 6 months building new servers and moving them into place to replace the old one. Still in the process of doing this today and things are going well. The secondary server is doing good and the primary is due for a swap out in the next few weeks.
Now the question is WHY?

Why is this an issue?

Why did IBM fail to fix it years ago and lastly WHY is V5R4 still supported?

I know in the next few months V5R4 will fall out of support. I think it is later this year, but as some of you have pointed out this is unacceptable and the question needs to be asked. Why did IBM not want to invest the time to fix what I consider one of it’s most stable and most robust OS’es (short of OS/2 )

I am still here….

So it’s been a long while since I have posted anything. I have been in the middle of a fire fight at work getting things fixed up and working. The smoke is starting to clear and frankly I have learned some new things about Lotus I need to share. There is a Twitter Account that goes along with this blog and I will be tweeting as best I can using it and the blog to try to make an impact on the businesses who user Lotus, don’t use Lotus and everyone else.

I am not dead

Life has gotten in the way of blogging and to my 2 fans I am very sorry. I have been dealing with a few life changes and assure you I am alive and willing to start blogging again. Sorry again for the outage.

Hope everyone enjoyed Lotusphere 2011. Some day I actually plan on making it down there and enjoying it myself.

Happy New Year Everyone

May 2011 be filled with Lotus Installations and Lotus deployments all over your company! To those running Exchange and getting tired of that one trick pony….call IBM and make this year full of Lotus!

Merry Christmas Everyone

I have been on a bit of a vacation. Sorry for not posting. I took 2 full weeks off and went on a 10-Day Panama Canal Cruise with Holland America. It was wonderful and I would recomend it to anyone. With Lotusphere only 30 days away it’s time to ramp up the Lotus posts.

Hope you all had a Merry Christmas and may the NEW YEAR be the best ever!

I want to get some . . . Lotus Training

I am looking for “other” Lotus training. I know about Integro in Denver, and they are super people that supported the local Lotus User Group, but I am trying to get more of a list of places that offer Lotus Training other than IBM/Lotus. I am also a big fan of TLCC as well.

Hit me with your favorite places to send people to train or where you go to learn more?

My Mac is still in the shop

As you know now my MacBook Pro is a bit sick. It’s been at the Apple Store for about a week now. Apple says the repair is covered and will be FREE.  That is sweet to hear. It should be ready on Saturday in the morning. I hope to have it back soon as all of the things I have not stored in my head are on that Mac. I will be looking for a nice Referbed Mac after the first of the year when they all seem to go on sale.

JoliCloud Releases new Netbook

LINK:: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/joliclouds-jolibook-netbook-hitting-stores

I get the feeling this is not going to be as big a hit as they think it is. The JoliCloud OS is really nice and I enjoy using it but I think the day of Netbooks is over and Tablets are coming. Maybe they can get that JoliCloud OS on a tablet soon.

Novell gets purchased by an Unknown

LINK :: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/novell-lands-buyout-deal-worth-22-billion-2010-11-22?reflink=MW_news_stmp

Under terms of the deal announced Monday, an entity called Attachmate Corp. will acquire Novell and operate the company as two different business units. Novell will operate separately from its SUSE open-source business.

Attachmate is owned by an investment group led by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Bravo. The firm said it will add the Novell businesses to its own Attachmate and NetIQ businesses.

I like Novell and think they had some pretty decent products. The Open Source Linux side is the most important to me now. I hope the let them continue that work or sell that off to someone who cares.