Sanity Check

As I posted almost two weeks ago, I setup a Lotus Foundations server as my home server. I believe in the expression and practice to "eat you your own dog food" which simply means to use what you make or sell. Though IBM told me after 2 days of training I was ready to go out and make some money selling Foundations (wishful thinking) I know that I need to have intimate experience not only with how Foundations works, but also with how it doesn't work. I need to know how to troubleshoot the platform. After years supporting and developing for Domino on an AS/400 I have hundreds of indispensable tips and tricks, learned through innumerable trials, that get me out of a bind when things go wrong. "But things are not supposed to go wrong with Foundations because its...autonomic!" Or so they say. Well I have never seen nor expect to see PERFECT software this side of eternity.
 
So how did my implementation go? Well, last I wrote, I was getting my two drive RAID setup. That went flawlessly, though slow, but that's normal from what I've read about RAID.

Having already setup Teams (aka Groups) and Users, I was ready to move data. I simply mapped drives to the new server from my various home workstations. Already having a backup (via Carbonite.com) I did a cut paste to move data over as you normally would copy files. That worked except I had some files locked (probably by my workstation AV scan) which caused a little bit of havoc in getting things in sync again. First lesson learned: Use FTP and alway COPY, not MOVE files when doing a migration. Learn from your mistakes. Another issue was that the transfers took much longer than expected...warning sign that I did not heed. More on that in a second.

After my 70-80 GB of personal data was slowly migrated (not including video which I'm not going to move for now), I was ready to setup backup. I setup the Intelligent Disk Backup (called idB) which was simply a matter of clicking a button and accepting the defaults (it is more intelligent than I am). I am using an External Sata drive and I was quite amazed by the speed of the backup compared to USB.

Now I began to use the server from the mapped drives to my Vista and XP workstations. It was immediately recgnizable that there were file access speed issues, For example 1-2 MB pictures were taking 30 seconds or longer to open.

Seeing no explanation, nor errors in the logs, I opened a PMR with Lotus Support. Would I experience the same level of service I am used to from IBM?

First level support was what I expected, and I had done most of the troubleshooting already. For example, I had eliminated all the points of failure outside of the box and NIC card by replacing the cable, switched to a backup hub with just foundation and my laptop on the server, uninstalled Antivirus and turned off the laptop firewall. No change. The first level support person gave me a few Linux commands to check the network routing, and to obtain driver info and logs. Fascinating! I am not a Linux guy (yet) so I absorbed the learning and added this to my furture T/S toolbox.

I got passed to second level support, not quite as quickly as I had hoped (2 days?), but I wasn't losing any money or anything. It turns out that I knew the second level support engineer from Lotusphere and even before that at my two days of Foundations training at IBM in Markham. Let's call him Allen. He took charge and helped me forward my ports so he could access the Foundation server over the Internet. In the process, his advice was invaluable in helping me setup my Firewall and network properly using 2 NIC cards in the server. Eth0 was for the internal network and Eth1 went to my modem. Networking is fun...seriously.

When he logged in, apparently all checked out. Next, since I had a LogMeIn remote desktop account he was able to log into a workstation on my network and hit the server as a user would. He concurred...definitely something wrong. Now since this was a "white box" server (though its actually black) that I invested very little in, I was a little concerned that I would be told, "Sorry this is not a supported PC" and I'd then be stuck having purchased this PC without Windows from a local store over 2 weeks ago. But my fears were alleviated. You see, I had prepared well by running the burn-in compatibility test on the Foundations CD and those tests concluded this box was supported. To make a long story short, there was some incompatibility between the integrated NIC and the Linux driver. According to Allen he found similar reports from other Linux users dealing with the same card. The workaround: Switch to a more generic external card. To start with, all I need to do was disable Eth0 (integrated card) through the BIOS, disconnect the Internet from Eth1 and a move my LAN to the external card. After booting up, file transfer was like lightning. So, after a quick trip back to the computer store for another $20 Gigabit NIC, I was back up and running with my dual-NIC setup, firewalled, without any issues. My wife was relieved as her pictures are precious to her (to me too, but I am more of a stoic I guess).

Update: Turns out my second customer (my church) where I am installing a Foundations Server has the exact same issue with their integrated NIC. Well, I know how to solve that one thankfully.

Over all, it was good I had issues. I started with a good attitude, a teachable spirit, and full confidence IBM would be able to resolve this issue. After all, its a very typical setup. Through it all I learned a wealth of knowledge. The only stress was from my "customer" whom I had heard others refer to their counterpart as SWMBO (she who must be obeyed).

This past week, I installed Domino (which is the "START" in Foundations START). Really, it couldn't be simpler. Installs for Foundations are packaged a certain way so that all you need to do is FTP the *.PKG folder  into the server's autoinstall folder. In minutes it shows up on the console as an installable package. Click on install and in 20 minutes or so your Domino server is installed, configured with your user accounts, optional Notes ID's created, and ready to send/receive mail via web mail or your choice of mail client  I fired up iNotes and after some DNS changes and niggling issues over the fact that my ISP makes running your own mailserver difficult, I proved it  worked. Eventually, I'm going to get a proper ISP that allows me to serve up my web pages and run my own mailserver without hassle.

What's next?

• Setup my church on Foundations (next weekend)
• Learn more about PHP & MySQL
  
• Learn how to package a Notes NSF app to autoinstall on Foundations (my own apps of course)
  
• Learn XPages. I want to be a value added reseller with a full toolkit.
  
• Start selling
  

(If you don't have hair, substitute whatever equivalent expression would be appropriate e.g. how to avoid unnecessary bashing of your head on the desk)

I love Quickr, but we'll continue just dating for now because there just a couple annoyances that made me question my sanity until I understood that they were predictable, avoidable bugs. Learn from my pain and be happy with Quickr. Note that we are using the Domino release of Quickr, currently 8.1.0.1 and connectors 8.1 HF8

1. Do not create folders in a place that are one character (e.g. don't do A, B, C, D....Z). After E, you'll find that they show in the Web Browser, but not in the connectors. There is a technote I stumbled across that says to use more than one character.
   
2. Do not use any special characters in a place name (like apostrophes and ampersands) -Using HF5 version of the connectors, we had no issue, but as soon as we upgraded to HF8...well let's just say the results were not pretty. Upgraded users seemed ok, for a while, but new users could not see all their places in the connector. The solution was to rename the title of places that had special characters (e.g. Marketing's Place, Operations & Support) then use QPTool to unregister and register these places. 

Anyone else have a list.

Its just not visible on passport yet...
I guess the BP's get first crack at it. Here's hoping its all its reported to be...faster, less buggy.