Bruce's Blog

Since my entry in April about moving forward with a VMWare implementation to run Domino 8, Sametime 8, & Quickr 8, no progress has been made.  First it was a couple of higher priorities put this project on hold.  Then finance didn't want to spend that much money that month.  Then we've been working with a VAR on some other IT infrastructure projects and they mentioned going with VirtualIron instead of VMWare as our virtualization infrastructure to safe money.  Then the shake-up at VMWare happened.  So, now we are re-evaluating wether we should continue to go with VMWare or look at an alternative like VirtualIron.
My question is, has anyone used any of the XEN hypervisors (VirtualIron in particuliar) for their Domino environment?  If so, how's it worked out?
It looks like it should work OK according to what I've read so far, but it does introduce the question of application support. 

We are a Domino 7.02 environment.  We have a mixture of office & factory workers.  My question is - is there an easy way to provide internal mail but block internet email (incoming and outgoing) to a subset of my users?

We use Postini as our external SMTP gateway service.  Recently, they released a directory sync tool that actually works natively with Domino.  I've been playing around with it and almost have it figured out (they don't give very good examples on how to setup the LDAP queries and/or exclusion filters).  The one problem I have left is, we have a number of groups setup for internet email (i.e. the group has an internet email address that outside customers user that then get delivered to multiple people internally).  I do not see these in the Postini dirsync tool so it wants to delete them from Postini.  I thought that was strange, so I fired up my trusty Softerra LDAP browser.  I configured a new profile to talk to my Domino directory, and lo and behold, I don't see the groups there either.  I see person docs, OU's, & Mail-In DB's, but no groups.  Any one (or probably most of you), know what I'm doing wrong?

Since coming back from Lotusphere, we have been making plans to upgrade our Domino environment from 7 to 8.  Originally we were thinking of buying a new server and putting up a new Domino 8 domain on Linux.  We were going to setup a new domain for 2 main reasons.  The first is because we have purchased some other companies and have multiple different email domains (the new companies in Exchange).  By putting up a new domain, we could make it more generic so we could make it more palatable to maybe move the back-end for the other companies off of Exchange and unto Domino.  The second reason was to make things all the new "version 8" way and not carry over so much legacy configuations (our current Domino domain started as either version 4.6 or 5.0 about 8 years ago, I forget which).

In the last few weeks, we've been making some other changes to our infrastructure (put in a new internet firewall, going to move things around in our computer room and add some new A/C units, etc).  Because of this, we need to get rid of an old rack that only has 2 active servers in it anymore.  One of them is our SameTime 6.5 server.  We could physically unmount the server from the rack and move it somewhere else, or install a new server with version 8 on Linux and get the web-conferencing piece working (which never did on the old box).  Also, we took advantage of a deal IBM was running and purchased 50 Quickr licenses.

To do these 3 things, we could buy 3 seperate servers, or we could buy 1 server with higher specs and finally (we have been looking at it for 3 years) move into the VMWare world.  We've had a SAN environment for over 2 years, but have never gotten to put in the "all encompassing" VMWare environment we've been looking at.  So, this would allow us to get into VMWare for a much smaller dollar figure.

Looks like VMWare is the direction we are going to go, YEAH!!!!!!

We are going to have 3 virtual servers - 2 are SUSE Linux for the Domino Mail Servers and the SameTime server, and 1 Windows 2003 server for Quickr.  All of them in a new Domino domain.

Let the fun began!

My Idea

I know that Notes 8.01 does not officially support roaming profiles.  My question is, does anyone know exactly what that means?  My environment is currently Domino 7.02 servers with Notes 7.02 clients using the 7.02 template.  This week, I finally got around to installing a Notes 8.01 client on a test machine to start playing with it, showing my boss, and possibly our executives what is new.  We heavily use the roaming feature, not for roaming, but for having a copy of a person's local NAB for data recovery and PC migrations.  When I opened up the 8.01 client with my ID, it started pulling down all my info from the server (just as if roaming was actually working.  It seemed to work just fine.  Also, a couple of times when I've opened up my 7.02 client, I've gotten the version 8 icons in my bookmark column.

My idea

 I hate that every time I go to remove a folder I no longer need,  it collapses my whole folder structure.  I have a nested folder structure that I've spent a bit of time creating, and I have a number of them I like to always have open (the ones I use all the time) and a bunch that I leave collapsed, and only open when I need them.  Whenever I need to remove a folder, it collapses the whole structure and I have to go back in and open up the ones I want to always be open

My idea

 An aciotn button so end-users  could forward a mail message to a domain-wide configured e-mail address with the full header so it could easily be used by services such as Postini or appliances like Baracudda to help control SPAM.

My idea

 As a site like bleedwellow has taken off, it would be nice to be able to publish my Sametime ID on some of these public communities as well as the "normal" public IM networks.

My idea

 Our company has purchased a couple of other companies recently.  I know that we could consolidate all our mail infrastrcuture into one and let the existing users keep their existing internet e-mail address (different domains).  The problem I have is that we have some users who have "personas" in each domain.  Current;y, since we haven't integrated, this means they have multiple e-mail clients (Notes & Outlook) going against the proper back-end (Domino & Exchange).  If we consolidate, I don't have any easy way for this person to have one mailbox, but 2 different outgoing internet e-mail addresses.  It would be nice that if a message came into john@companyA.com, his reply would go out as john@companyA.com and a message to john@comapnyB.com would respond from john@companyB.com. With the amount or mergers & acquisitions going on, I would think this would be something alot of people would like IBM/Lotus to address.

My idea

I use server-based archiving and roaming profiles.  It's a pain that when I delete a user I have to go in and manually delete the archive file and the roaming profile files.  It would be nice that these were cleaned up autmatically just like the mail file.

 I'm the network administrator for a small (but growing) international manufacturing company. I manage the Novell Netware servers, Microsoft servers, SUSE Linux servers, MS SQL, Domino, Sametime, WebSphere Portal, Cisco Switches, Cisco Routers, DNS, DHCP, etc. Pretty much everything except the AS/400 and phone system. I also dabble in some Domino developement.  I started out as a mainframe Cobol programmer about 20 years ago.  I moved into PC networking about 15 years ago and haven't looked back.  I started dealing with Notes at version 3 on OS/2.  Currently, we are getting ready to implement version 8 on Linux.  Not sure how often I'll post.  I don't have any great new things that people don't already know about.  I'm more likely to have stories about how not to do things or questions about things I don't know how to do.  My first few posts will be the ideads I've posted on IdeaJam.