Smith's Statements on Stuff

Lotusphere fever is definitely building in the brain of Smith! - Announcements today on opening party and Wednesday party - Universal Studios this year. Personally I prefer going to Universal than Disney for the party, more rides (although I've never been to MGM).

Started looking round for vendor parties to attend, don't know why I get worked up about it, as when you're at Lotusphere there's so much going on you never seem to have enough time anyway. If you are hosting a party or know of a good one and want to invite a lively free drink drinker, send me an invite!

A more somber posting on Domain Consolidation will follow shortly, as that is today's topic of note at work.

ttfn

Well, I'm permanently hairy , but I've sponsored a friend who's grown a 'tash in support of prostate cancer research!

As part of my current project to upgrade an organisation from 6.5 to 8.0.2, we have an issue where users have multiple local archives with editor access and enforce consistent ACLs set. We don't know what they might have called the files, and have no realistic way to get them onto a server where we could crack them open and then upgrade them.

Our solution is to write a small app that will do the following:

• prompt the user to pick his archives from a list of the dbs on the client.
• create a local group that matches an admin group that exists in all mail databases.
• add a new ID - "archive admin" to that group. This ID will have no password set and have no permissions or group memberships on servers.
• Switch the client to this ID
• now we have manager access to the archive/s we can upgrade the design of them to mail8.ntf
• finally - switch the user back to their own ID.

It can therefore be a self service solution - if users have local archives they just open the app ( we will send them a link, we're nice like that - suppose we could add a bookmark via policies) and they manage the upgrade of their archives themselves.

Just need to test it now :-)

Oh well, got my rejection slip in this morning. Still, with the number of submissions it must be a. hard to choose and b. a leap of faith to pick new presenters with no track record.

On reflection if I'm serious about presenting at the sphere I should probably work up to it, and submit sessions for ILUG, UKLUG, etc and then into the "paid" conferences.

Will be chatting to the powers that be about getting backing to do this. On the plus side, I can look forward to a relaxing (comparatively) Lotusphere in January and take tips from the pros.

One of the limitations of Widgets and RSS in the Standard Client sidebar is that if you are behind a proxy server, you need to enter the proxy information in the Notes location document (as Notes can't or won't detect the IE proxy settings).

Highly annoying (as I've said before). On my current project the customer has users who roam between US / EMEA / Asia and although we can preset a proxy setting when we roll the clients out, we don't want them having to change locations whenever they travel just for proxy info (which may change over time anyway).

So, we've come up with a scheme for a "where am I?" Widget, which allows users to select their location - which in turn updates the proxy info in their location doc. Proxy info will be held in the user's local CDC/MDC, as we can guarantee that everyone will have this database and we can amend and distribute changes centrally to it.

Ta-da! New functionality solving a problem that was of it's own making.

My tempestuous romance with my MacBook Pro continues, a heady mix of the joys of exploring a new windoze free world mixed with the pain of never reading the manuals and committing endless schoolboy errors.

I had the opportunity onsite to link my mbp to an external monitor during a meeting, and proudly brandished the mini-dvi to vga connector that had been sitting in the box when I unpacked the mbp. "Let's use the big screen" I cried. This nearly turned into actual tears when I took the time to look at the ports on my mbp and found it had a DVI port but not the mini one! The connector is for a macbook not a macbook pro!

fortunately the day was saved with a locally produced DVI to VGA connector.

I soon madeup with my mbp when I got a call from the office saying my 4gb memory upgrade had arrived. This was duly delivered today but the joy again turned to tears when I realised my mini screwdriver set is in my office desk, 24 miles away. Denied again!

Will this torment never end?

After playing WOW for a year I "gave up" a few months ago, and have been drifting along looking for the next new thing. I recently got Warhammer Online as a birthday pressie (21 again!).

Now, WOW has been out for a few years and runs on my now decidedly average PC, so why does a brand new game not look as good as WOW, still need more power and have clunkier UI / controls. They've recreated all the main concepts from WOW but haven't been able to pull off the whole package.

So, I cranked up my WOW program, sat through 1.3GB of updates and am once again a happy pally. Interestingly as the new release (Wrath of the Lich King) is about to be released the servers are maxed out, with queues to join and instances maxing out this evening! Looks like everyone is coming back for more :-)

On my shiny new Sametime Standard 8.0.1 server everything seemed fine, except -

When a meeting started presence worked, but slides. screen share, whiteboard were not functioning and after 30 seconds the meeting client lost its connection.
Turns out that the customer had McAfee EPO installed on the Sametime Server, which is using ports 8081 and 8082!

We're not tunneling HTTP so merely had to change the meeting services from using 8081 to another port and hey presto everything works fine.

Another panic over, 2 more grey hairs though :-(

Technote explaining it all is here: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=203&uid=swg21246857

Setting up an 8.0.2 messaging pilot and RSS feeds weren't working - when you tried to add on you get a "server returned error :0" style message.
The customer has a web proxy so added the FQDN of the proxy server to the location document (basic tab > click the beanie hat!), still didn't work.
Sulked a bit - read lots of forum entries and technotes that said use FQDN, felt rebellious, changed the FQDN to IP Address of the proxy and hey presto - we have RSS feeds! (And yes, the machine could resolve and ping the proxy's FQDN!).

Why can't the proxy settings be detected from the O/S? I don't have to use proxy settings in the embedded browser to view web pages, is it too much to ask for some consistency?

Grrrr.

My lovely employers (should they be reading) recently furnished me with a MacBook Pro (oooh), after much grief with my HP XP machine.
Whilst I could have read the manual (not), I am transitioning the usual Admin way by having a go. Whilst it is a lovely machine I had two initial gripes to anyone who would listen:

1. No right click on the machine - right click works on a mouse, but only one button on the laptop - go figure.
2. No "page down" button! I was pressing the down arrow like a maniac when wading through long docs.
 
Of course, I now know that by merely placing two fingers on the touchpad and then clicking it acts as right click - very swish, and that pressing "fn" with the arrow is page down / up.
Took me quite a while to work this out.

Two very simple issues, easily resolved, which caused me to complain about an otherwise fantastic piece of kit.

What has this got to do with Notes? Well, in a number of recent conversations I've heard opinions that user training is not a high priority as part of an R8 upgrade. Tut tut.
So just remember - the simplest things that we assume users could figure out for themselves may in fact cause them grief. This will turn them from advocates to, um, non-advocates.

User education is key to getting acceptance of a new piece of software, and make them feel part of the process. Extend traditional training (handouts, sessions, cbt, floor walkers, cafe "drop-in desks", etc etc) and use some of the collab tools available - how about an upgrade project Blog, with weekly "what's new" articles? When you roll your 8 clients out set an RSS to the project blog to keep users up to date with developments and ideas. Think about a few useful widgets, create the catalog and use policies to point users to it. Go on, go, on, go on.

In response to: Installing Servers using RDP

Thanks for that update Chris Im sure to forget when I use an SP3 machine for at least half an hour :-)

We had a couple of annoying gotchas recently when installing Domino on VM servers using RDP, which I though I'd share in case you have to do it:

1. Not all RDP sessions are equal - you need to get the actual server console, so run "mstsc -console". This is important when running the installer as the java applet (accept licence dialog etc) only shows on the server console, not in a user session. If you have just run "mstsc" chances are you will see nothing except multiple instances of the setup exe as you keep clicking it. A further caveat is that even with -console we still had one box that we couldnt see the installer and had to use VMWare tools to see the actual console.

2. Temp dir - When RDP'd in "temp" was built as c:\documents & settings\user....\temp, for out Sametime 8.0.1. standard server the installer wouldn't start because the path was too long. So, make sure temp is set to something catchy like c:\temp.

'part from that it all worked great, happy installing.

As part of setting up my Bleed Yellow profile I hummed and hahhed over a profile pic. I don't tend to have many pics that would be suitable, the only one I fancied was the account pic that the inbuilt camera on my mac took when I first set it up.

Coming from a windoze background I couldn't find where the picture was on the file system and repeated google attempts found frustrating accounts of iPhone picture syncs etc, but not what I wanted. Today I finally cracked it in Users\-your name-\Library\Application Support\Address Book\Images. (having said that I now can't recreate how I exported the image as a jpeg - I have soo much to learn on the Mac).

But, while it looks great small - when I import it into my profile it is sized up and distorts (a bonus some may say), so my search for a profile pic goes on....


yours in shadows (for now)

Peter

During the design phase on an R8 upgrade project a "Design Goal" of "Anywhere access to mail" was created.

Given that this should be available to everyone - whenever they want - and there are 1000s of users, my solution was to use reverse proxies in the DMZ and pinhole through the firewall to the mail servers. All SSL'd, optionally could use RSA to authenticate on the proxy etc. The security guys, on the other hand, apparently get very stressed about "pin holing" and favor holding replicas of mail on DMZ servers.

To my mind this is worse - all the mail is permanently held in the DMZ (shurely a security risk) and you basically need to double your mail storage and servers to ensure everyone could use it - (most won't and the mobile and powerful have Berrys).

While everyone has their own position on these matters (like the endless "run design / don't run design" conversation), it made me laugh because on the other hand the same security team allow internal BES servers to run happliy in the same manner I want the iNotes to work!