Smith's Statements on Stuff

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.

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.

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!