Domino Diva

The speaking schedule was just sent out to speakers.  Woo hoo, I got great time slots for my session:

 A colleague and friend of mine, Amy Hoerle, has put together a comprehensive education module for DAOS.  Amy works in the IBM Lotus support center at IBM Rochester, MN and is extremely knowledgeable. While the title of the education module is "Introduction to Domino Attachment Object Service (DAOS), it is definitely more than an introduction.  Amy covers not only what DAOS is and how to set it up, she also provides insights into items that could easily be overlooked such as:
 

In working with a customer that is planning to upgrade their server this coming weekend to 8.5.1, there is some confusion regarding whether or not any hotfixes are required for 8.5.1 on the iSeries.  The answer is YES if you are planning to implement DAOS.  There is an issue with the catalog not remaining synchronized. 

The issue was written up in SPR #:
AHOE7W5RTL

There is also a knowledge base article detailing the issue, IBM i: DAOS catalog cannot stay synchronized

If you are implementing DAOS on Domino 8.5.1 on the iSeries, make sure you call IBM support and ask for this specific hotfix.

 I want to remind everyone that the Lotus Domino 8.5.x installations are saved to release V6R1 for the iSeries.  I recently worked with a customer to upgrade their environment to 8.5 and installation of the Domino server code took over 3 hours.  Their OS level is V5R4 and they have an older model 810. 

Once the installation was underway, the CPU utilization on the iSeries server hovered in the 70-95% range for the duration of the installation of the Domino 8.5 code.  There were 3 jobs consuming the majority of the CPU:

LDFX01
LDFX02
LDFX04

These LDFX jobs are the jobs associated with doing the program conversion.  Interestingly enough, they were only visible through the WRKSYSACT command, they did not show up in WRKACTJOB.  This is how the good old CFINIT jobs behave as well.  You have to have the performance tools loaded on your iSeries server to use the WRKSYSACT command.

Beware when installing Domino 8.5.x on a V5R4 system, the program conversions will increase installation time.  While my customer experienced an increase of 3 hours+, newer, faster systems will see shorter program conversion times.  One the newer hardware, the program conversions can be done in around 10 minutes.

Make sure you plan for the added time the installation will take due to the program conversion and ensure you don't decide to do the installation during production hours because of the significant increase in CPU consumption.  The multi-version capability has made this a regular practice in a number of iSeries shops.  While this normally has no impact on production applications, the program conversion can cause performance concerns to other applications running on the iSeries server.

The program conversion will also happen when installing 8.5.x hotfixes on a V5R4 system.

I am at the airport, heading to the ZendCon conference in San Jose, CA.  I am expanding my companies' services into the PHP arena and had the opportunity to attend the ZendCon conference.  I'm looking forward to meeting with the developers and hearing from the industry experts that are presenting sessions.

 In working with a customer recently, we were looking for ways to free up some disk space on their iSeries server.  This customer had this as their Domino upgrade path over the past several years:

6.5.0 -> 6.5.1 -> 6.5.2 -> 6.5.3 -> 8.0.1 -> 8.5

The older Domino code loads had all been removed, however the contents of the /QIBM/ProdData/Lotus/DominoXXX directories had not been cleaned up.  We found code in the /Domino650, /Domino 651, /Domino652, and Domino653 subdirectories.  The /Domino801 subdirectory was empty, however the subdirectory was still on the system. 

All of the programs, service programs, and jar files for a specific release of Domino are stored in the /DominoXXX subdirectory for that specific release of Domino server code.  With the actual licensed program product for the release of Domino removed from the server, there was no need to have these directory structures left on the server. 

In order to delete these directories and their contents, we used the Edit File utility (EDTF) which has an option to recursively delete the contents of the subdirectories and then the subdirectories themselves. Upon entering the command below, you will see all of the /DominoXXX subdirectories that exist on your system.  

I was fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to speak at the Midwest Lotus User Group (MWLUG) conference a few weeks ago in Chicago.  One of the things that really stood out to me was how humble the people were that came up with the idea to have a Lotus user group conference in the Midwest.  At the opening session, Gregg Eldred and Richard Moy explained how they had come up with the idea for the conference.  Both Gregg and Richard went out of their way to ensure that everyone who was involved with organizing the conference was given credit for the work they had done.

Neither Gregg nor Richard bragged about what they had accomplished in creating and organizing the conference.  I know they both spent a significant amount of time pulling the conference together and executing it. These people are true leaders.  They took the initiative to develop and execute their plan for a Lotus conference and spent zero time telling everyone how much work it was for them to pull it off.  It is clear they put in thousands of hours to ensure the conference was a success.  In today's day and age, it is rare that people don't toot their own horn.  Hats off to Richard and Gregg for doing such a fantastic job with the conference and for being so humble about the extraordinary amount of work they put into the conference!!  Job well done guys!  You are true leaders.

If you have DAOS implemented on the IBM i (iSeries, AS/400) platform, you need to be aware of two issues you can run into.  Both issues are referenced in tech note 1398097. 

The first issue is related to the 'tell daosmgr prune x' command.  When this command is executed on the iSeries, it ignores the number of days passed in on the command and defaults to 0. 

The second issue affects reading of the daos.cfg file.  If there are more than 40,000 .NLO files in a single DAOS subdirectory, the daos.cfg file is not read correctly.

If you are using DAOS on the IBM i, you should contact support to obtain the proper hotfixes to avoid running into these two issues.

There are two new IBM i blogs I would like to share with you.  The first blog, You and i, is a blog where the IBM i product manager (Craig Johnson) and chief architect (Steve Will), share what is going on with IBM i along with the technical details on how it works and what sets it apart.  If you have ever wondered what Single Level Store is and why it makes the iSeries better, check out Steve's lastest blog post.

The other new blog, iCan, is written by Dawn May.  Dawn is the technical lead and business architect for IBM i.  The focus of her blog is to share features of the operating system.  I know from working with my customers that it's really hard for most customers to keep on top of all of the new enhancements added each release.  Dawn's blog will shed light on various features the system offers.

I hope you find these blogs helpful.

I have found DDM probes to be very helpful in analyzing Domino performance issues with agents without having to go to all of the work to manually instrument the code.  I wrote an article for IBM System i magazine detailing how I have used DDM probes to help identify and optimize agents that are large memory consumers.  Here is a link to the article "The Importance of DDM Probes".

I hope you find the article helpful.

I have been fortunate enough to have two of my session abstracts accepted for speaking at the Midwest Lotus User Group (MWLUG) conference that will be held in Chicago, IL August 27-28.  My two sessions are:

• Dust Off Your Servers with a Server Health Check
• Domino Performance Best Practices on System i

If you are looking for great Lotus education, I recommend you check out this conference.  The opening session is being done by Ed Brill and there are three tracks:

• Administration and infrastructure
• Application development
• Business development

I would like to extend a special thank you to Gregg Eldred for pinging me about the conference and encouraging me to submit some abstracts, thanks Gregg!

I was recently doing some performance work for a customer and noticed in analyzing their memory checks and memory dumps there was a memory leak.  The application that was causing the memory leak was using LS2J.  I contacted support, and they were able to confirm that the memory leak indeed existed when using LotusScript to call Java.  I checked with another customer that restarts a couple of their application servers every evening.  Sure enough, on those servers, they were executing LS2J code. 

Both of my customers are running on iSeries (AS/400, System i), and it appears this may be the only platform affected, although this is not 100% for sure.  If you use LS2J calls in your applications, I recommend you do memory dumps and memory checks to see if there is indeed a memory leak.  If you find a memory leak, here is the SPR number you can reference when calling the issue into support:

SPR #: AHOE7TPQKC  [SPR number has been corrected]
My customers that encountered the LS2J memory leak are running 7.0.3, 8.0.2, and 8.5.

Last evening I read a wonderful article about women in IT (Making the Climb Women in IT Team Up To Succeed).  The article featured three different women and how they have been working to help other women succeed in IT.  The three women are Carolyn Leighton, Dee Dee Lear, and Sandy Carter.  Carolyn and Dee Dee made some great points that really struck me as I read the inserts about each of them.  Carolyn Leighton is the founder of Women in Technology International (WITI).  In the excerpt about her (Carolyn Leighton), she brought up a very critical point.  Carolyn states "today our biggest obstacles to having women as CEOs is how women view themselves".  This is so true.  I was told by my family I couldn't go to college because I was a girl and didn't need to.  I didn't believe that and therefore didn't let that stop me.  In general, I have never let other people's perceptions of what their role of women in society is stop me from doing what I wanted to do and was interested in doing.  Carolyn Leighton has started 6 companies, she clearly hasn't let her vision be stunted.

In the excerpt about Dee Dee Lear, she makes a very interesting observation.  She talks about young women graduating from college now and states "They have an untainted view and they don't see the glass ceiling.  It's the 'me generation'.  This generation doesn't let the outside world determine who they'll be and they aren't intimidated.  They've seen women as CEOs of large, worldwide Fortune 100 companies and women running for the highest political offices in their countries."

Sandy Carter has done some amazing things with the EXploring Interests in Technology and Engineering (EX.I.T.E) Camp for elementary girls.  She explains in the article that in the first camp, zero of the 100 girls in the camp were interested in IT at the start of the camp.  During the camp, the girls programmed a robot, created a Web site and pretended to be sales reps.  At the end of the camp, 98 out of the 100 girls wanted to pursue a career in IT.  This ties directly into Carolyn Leighton's point that the biggest obstacles women have today is how they view themselves.

I hope you enjoy reading the article as much as I did.

I hadn't defragged my hard drive for a while.  I used Power Defragmentor this evening (which I highly recommend, http://power-defragmenter-gui.en.softonic.com/).  It has been over a few weeks since I ran my last defrag, I know, bad!  Prior to running Power Defragmentor, I had 3.87 GB free on my hard drive.  After running Power Defragmentor, I had 8.15 GB free.  I really need to schedule this to run more frequently.  Happy Defragging!

Today is the 9th anniversary of starting my company.  I can't believe it's been that long!!