Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from 2006

Change Management

Since my last post, I've been busy with a lot of things, but one of the most important things has been change management. The problems I, and most other IT people always seem to face is the constant influx of half-baked ideas from Management filtering down without proper paperwork. It has always been a policy of mine to not say "NO" to people without giving their problems/solutions serious thought. Unfortunately this takes quite a toll on my time. This has been a good policy and I'd strongly advise anyone who has Juinor IT staff, particularly helpdesk people, to take a policy like this onboard. Unfortunately, this doesn't work quite so well in IT Management. Here, we need to take a tougher stance. One of the worst aspects of being proactive as well as responsive to user requests is that it encourages plausible deniability. Users who get into trouble about a project, or change their mind about it, can easily deny having asked for it in the first place. It does

Business/Application Ownership

We're having a lot of trouble at work at the moment over business ownership and change management. Here's how the cycle works... 1. Something goes wrong 2. Blame IT 3. Say that IT Needs proper "change management" and authorisation 4. Make IT Write a Business Process for Change Management 5. IT Writes about Business Ownership and Signoff 6. IT Presents it to Management (Personally) 7. Management agree that this is good, but a lot of work 8. IT Takes it to a committee who decide that it's too much work 9. Committee says "we don't want to be bothered with this kind of work" 10. IT is required to rewrite the procedures so that minimal authorisation is required (Everything chuggs along again happily until something else goes wrong - then the cycle restarts). Sorry if this all sounds very negative. I'll have some more constructive thoughts on change management once I get a little more time to report it.

A Disasterous Upgrade - and a Warning about Nomad.

What a disastrous week we have had! Last weekend, we upgraded one of our most critical systems on the Domino server. The system in question is primarily transaction based and as a result records are being added and deleted constantly. The upgrade went well and all our post-implementation and testing was great. We all went home on Saturday feeling much relieved that the upgrade had gone as planned. On Monday, the first day in which the system was going to be used by our clients, we received a phone call to say that they were able to create a record with the same primary key as another record in the system. We commenced an investigation to see what the extent of the problem was, not expecting a great deal of trouble after all of the testing we have done. We were surprised. There were quite a few duplicate records, many of which were very similar but not exactly the same. The dates on these records varied considerably making it even harder to identify a pattern. In desperation, we r

Why all the testing in the world can't protect you from Everything

In the light of my recent blogs, I thought this was worth relating. We have one very critical system running on the Domino server. Everything else could fail for a while without problems, but not this one system. The system has had the most extensive testing possible at our environment with a several test periods of several weeks each. This may not sound much, but it is a long time considering that the system isn't overly complex. The way this system works is that requests are submitted over the internet for number allocations. These are processed internally and passed through a manual approval phase. Upon approval, there's a certain amount of time that must elapse before it is legal to use these numbers in production environments. Recently one of our people had a clock problem on their PC. They fixed it themselves (our policies don't restrict users from touching their PC clocks - though the clocks all re-synch at startup). In fixing the problem, this user managed to c

Testing and Clarification

After seeing some responses from the Notes/Domino community complaining about the apparent lack of testing I thought I'd better do some clarification. Although I come from a long background in Notes with mult-server environments, I'm currently enjoying something of a break while I get the early child-rearing period of my life completed. I'm now at a small business with only ONE production server an no need to worry about screwing up other people's systems. If anyone has to wear the blame for a problem - it's me. That said, we're doing things here that I've never seen done at any of my previous (and much larger notes/domino installations). We have some business/industry critical stuff running on Domino and it's being used by most of the biggest names in Australian banking. We have a backup server which does nothing and could be down for weeks without anyone noticing. I always upgrade this first. We're soon going to be moving to a cluster - where

Notes and Domino 7.0.2

I downloaded Notes and Domino 7.0.2 yesterday and had a play with the client. For the most part I can't notice any differences. This is great because it means that user acceptance will be perfect. As expected, the client works with all of our applications - no modifications necessary. Nomad - Notes on a USB Stick I tried to get Notes installed on a USB Stick, but my first attempt using the Designer + Administrator client, wasn't a success. I then downloaded the normal client and tried following Paul Rigby's excellent instructions ( http://paulrigby.blogs.com/weblog/2006/10/wandanomad_note.html ). It worked like a charm. This feature is absolutely fantastic. In particular, it would make a great DRP option for anyone who, like me, carries all of their DRP materials in a single Notes DB. The Domino Server Upgrade This morning I upgraded our domino server. It wasn't planned but I needed to process some of the Windows updates and reboot, so I figured that if I had any

How to Easily Locate and Customize your Computer with Wallpaper and Screensavers

Introduction I found myself writing these instructions for my cousin. Since I put a bit of effort into them, it makes sense not to waste it. Hence, I'm putting them up here for everyone to use. A word about screen-sizes You don't have to stick to specific screen sizes, but wallpaper generally looks much better if you do. If you don't have a fancy widescreen monitor, then your resolution is likely to be one of the three main sizes of screen.... 640 x 480 800 x 600 1024 x 768 Usually you'll have 800 x 600, but it's ok to get things of the other two sizes too as they will resize to fit. The bigger ones (1024) will look better than the smaller ones (640) Finding Suitable Wallpaper and Screensaver Images Start Internet Explorer Go to the Google Homepage http://www.google.com or if you're in Australia you can use http://www.google.com.au Click on Images In the Search bar type: "Winnie the Pooh" 1024 Note that we're using inverted commas to keep o

Microsoft's Model of Swiss Cheese software security is killing my Server

Whenever I set up a server, I always make sure that the operating system is on one disc or partition and that the data or applications are on another. When I set up our Domino server, Domino went on D: drive and Windows went on C: drive. In the past, I have had the space problems with Domino because it contains data such as mail which grows explosively. I made absolutely sure that I bought a server with a very large hard drive. I look at the Microsoft recommendations for Windows 2003 server partition size and tripled it. The remaining space I allocated to Domino. A year and a half later, Domino is still going strong with plenty of room left on the partition. Windows however is starting to run out of disk space because of all the Microsoft updates. There's only 15% free space on the drive. I only run the critical updates not the "nice to have" ones and I don't run any of Microsoft's worst patching offenders, such as exchange and sharepoint. Why is it then, tha

How to Make a Compilation DVD from Video Clips on Movie DVDs

The Wishlist One of my long-time wish lists for DVD recording was the ability to transfer all of those great music videos that come with movies from being scattered throughout the thousand odd DVDs in my collection to be on just a few compilation DVDs. I'm not really sure about the legality of the whole thing but given that I own these DVDs and that they are bought, not pirated I can't see an issue. Admittedly I haven't tried terribly hard to find the answer to a problem but I have put it to the number of user groups and they haven't been able to give me a decent solution. Last weekend, while mucking about on my computer, I think I accidentally solved the problem. Step 1: Unlocking the DVD The first step, after installing some relevant software which I will detail in this article, is to insert a DVD (duh...) and get a player, such as media player to play the DVD. It's not a bad idea to navigate to the music video and have a look at the title and chapter informati

Our Anti-Spam Saga

Our "Uncrashable" Notes Server has only crashed a few times in the last five years. Once it was due to an Archiving agent having issues with a corrupted mail. Every other time has been due to incompatibilities between the Symantec MailSecurity package and Windows. When we first got this package, we were very impressed and indeed it performed quite well for a number of years. The first really "WRONG" step, was when symantec lazily decided to get their premium Anti-Spam product to run from the Microsoft SMTP Service rather than from within Notes. This is not a technical issue. It's a cost cutting measure. Over the years, this one decision has caused us no end of grief. The final straw came a couple of months ago when we were about to go live with our second website on the same server. obviously we needed to move our configuration settings to site documents. Everything went fine until the reboot. Following the reboot, the Premium section of the Symantec MailSecu

Helping Your Users to Create HTML Signatures

I was a little stuck for new Notes material for this blog until I read the brilliant Alan Lepofsky's article on creating Signature files for Lotus Notes . Full URL of his Article http://www.alanlepofsky.net/alepofsky/alanblog.nsf/dx/creating-a-simple-html-signature-file His article provides a simple step-by-step guide to creating a signature using HTML and is very easy to follow but, as Notes Administrators and Developers, I feel that we have greater responsibility to protect our lower-level users from any kind of programming, so I'm going to post some code that I've been using. Where to put the Code Originally, I had this code built-in to our corporate mail template. You can do this if you want but the problem with building things into the mail template is that you have to remember to carry them through to the any new templates whenever you upgrade. A more elegant solution IMHO is to put the code into an instruction manual. My Instructions The following are the instruction

RSS Feeds from Domino

I'm a big fan of RSS and I think that it's something that people running extranets and other sites should try to incorporate as much as possible. Recently I decided to try and add RSS to a Domino Database manually. The steps are below. I've simplified them to make this more suitable for "beginners", and you can add other RSS Fields as you see fit. PART 1: The VIEW Create a view for your database with a selection criteria similar to the following; SevenDaysAgo := @Adjust(@Now ;0 ; 0 ; -7 ; 0 ; 0 ; 0) ; SELECT ((Form = "Document")& @Modified <= SevenDaysAgo)) The Form would obviously point to the type of form that you use in your database. Column 1: The first Column in your database would probably be the date (@Modified) You should make it sorted in Descending order to put the recent items to the top and you should make it hidden. Column 2: Here is what I have in column 2 - I'll explain it below... NOTE: I can't use <> HTML Codes Here,

More on Google's Services

I'm in danger of spending too much time praising google and no enough time on Notes/Domino, but here goes anyway. The Latest Google Toolbar I'm currently testing the latest google toolbar. There's a lot of new features in this one which are really quite useful. Bookmark Wonders This has to be my favourite part of the new toolbar. In fact, I think that this could well be my favourite computing enhancement in a long time - but.. since I've blogged about it before, I'll just shut up about it now. The Buttons Sure, the toolbar has had buttons on it for a long time - what's a toolbar without buttons anyway? These buttons are different. 1. Anyone can create them. 2. They can be hosted elsewhere and updated with a couple of clicks. 3. Google is building a library of them (they're not creating them, but they are testing them). 4. The buttons aren't simple one-click items, they work off the search field and can include RSS Feeds. I'll post a lot more about

The Final (?) Word on the Symantec Premium Anti-Spam Service for Domino

Last week, we needed to set up a secondary web site hosted from the same server. We did this by migrating from the standard Domino web setup to a configuration which used site documents. All worked well... Mail routed successfully, the old and the new web sites worked and everyone was happy. This morning, I applied the Microsoft Updates. Now these, being Microsoft products, required a server restart, so I dutifully complied. When the server came back up, no mail was routing. The Culprit After a bit of searching around (not very much searching really because I now tend suspect the Symantec MailSecurity services FIRST), I found a message saying that; "The Symantec Premium Anti-Spam service could not be started because you are using a site document". I rang Symantec and following a relatively quick game of telephone lotto, I got transferred to the right person. Yep, they confirmed it... Sorry - It's not supported. End of story. I disabled the service, but still mail did

Google Toolbar and GMail

Google Toolbar I'm sure that most people are well aware of the google toolbar by now. If not, you should certainly give it a go. You can access all of the google tools here (note that this is the Australian site, and that you may be better going to the google site for your country and clicking tools on the menu if you live elsewhere). You can download the the google toolbar by clicking the large button on the download page but did you notice that there's a smaller link underneath it which allows you to download the beta version of 4.0.629 . I've been running this for weeks now, and I've had no problems. The best bit though, is the new "bookmarks" feature. You can bookmark a page from the menu (as you would adding it to favourites). At the same time, or later if you wish, you can allocate categories to it. For example, my favourite online DVD shop is under DVDs and Shopping, while other things may just be under shopping. Effectively, this causes the bo

Who are Microsoft's Competitors?

These days it seems that Microsoft simply can't keep up with the competition, though I think they've simply been making too many enemies recently. I suppose that if I were to compile a list of the top competition for MS, it would look something like this (in order of danger); Google All those little niche things and web applets are really starting to take their toll. Google's desktop search is much better than the Microsoft Windows search and it beat their new search engine (coming real soon - on day - sigh) by a couple of years. Google's Gmail is heaps better that hotmail and beat the Windows Live Mail service (almost live now - sigh) by over a year. IBM (including Lotus) One of the worst things that Microsoft has done lately has been to annoy IBM as it has caused them to embark on a series of quite damaging "Move to Lotus" and "Move to the Penguin" campaigns. IBM is the second largest software developer in the world (after Microsoft) and their

Here there be Dragons...

Recently an old keyboard overuse injury has flared up again. Aside from the the exercises that I need to do to overcome it, the other thing that seems to be helping is that I have installed Dragon simply speaking. I remember trying out an IBM product called "VoiceType" some years back. That product was quite good although it did tend to confuse my voice with that of the dog. Strangely enough, it would never listen to anything my wife said - possibly a bit like myself :-) At the time I installed Dragon, my hopes weren't very high. I figured that if things had changed drastically in the industry, I would know about it. Dragon still isn't perfect, but people can come up and bother me at work and their words are not recorded. I still need to correct Dragon quite frequently, but it gets it right more often than it gets it wrong. I'll post and update after I have been using the software for a bit longer but you may be happy to know that this blog was written using

More on Symantec's Premium Anti-Spam Service for Domino

A quick recap If you remember, last time I blogged about this software we ended up turning it off because it was causing a lot of problems with a particular regular correspondant. Well... We turned the service back on after about a week because we were getting a lot of spam. I changed the settings to notify us if an email was blocked, but not to delete/quarantine it. We were notified of the spam, but were never notified of mail from the "offending" mail system (and mail from that system was not being delivered). Clearly the problem was much more than a simple mis-detection issue. The Real Culprit After doing a lot of searching, I eventually found the answer. It was that Microsoft, being unsatisfied with using the industry standard 7 bit MIME format, decided to implement an 8 bit version. Out of the box, Notes/Domino has compatibility with this format turned off (after all, it isn't the industry standard). Normally what would happen is that; An Exchange server would con

Some Lotus Figures

IBM Put a few figures on slides at LotusSphere. I'm just repeating them here for easy reference. Number of Notes/Domino 7 Seats: 12 Million Number of ND7 Downloads: 11,575 Number of Notes Users: 125 Million Number of Competitive Migrations: 1300 Recent Acquisitions: Bowstreet (December 2005) Bowstreet provide portal development tools. PureEdge Solutions Inc (July 2005) PureEdge are open standards forms developers.

LotusSphere comes to you...

Yesterday I attended LotusSphere comes to you in at the Sydney Hilton. Overall I think the half-day was a great success. If I had to complain about anything it would be that when I got my gift for attending, I left it with my papers while I went to get my lunch (only a few crowded meters away). When I got back, some knave had nicked it. (sigh)... Well, back to the day... The Keynote Speech This was very good and very reassuring. IBM has done a wonderful job over the last year and a bit to push Notes/Domino as well as Workplace. I think we all walked away with a very clear vision of the future. The EForms Stuff... I think that a lot of this stuff had people chomping at the bit... E-Forms, though not new, are terribly exciting and I can see that IBM has positioned themselves very well here. Now if only we had some of the E-Forms tools to play with (or a Macromedia Captivate tutorial on creating a form). Exchange Versus Domino Ok, it wasn't called this... it was called Selling N

Fun with Mail and Symantec Premium Anti-Spam

Today we finally resolved our problem getting emails from one of our major contacts. The problem had been going on for most of February, but had generally been unnoticed. The Symptoms There generally were no symptoms, people from Company X would send us emails and they wouldn't arrive. There was no mention in the Notes Logs about the emails and there was nothing in the Symantec Anti-Virus software to indicate that there was an issue. The company had recently changed their domain name from x1.com.au to x2.com.au (all domain names changed to protect the innocent) and we had, relatively recently upgraded to Domino 7.0, so there was much finger-pointing in both directions. Steps Taken The first thing I did was look through our firewall logs, but I quickly gave up - they were too difficult because of the sheer number of entries. I tried several methods of dumping the files, but they weren't readable and I couldn't see any filtering options. My first mistake was to not spend

Blogs and RSS and Notes

Why is this Domino Blog not hosted by Domino? Good question. The main reason is that I don't own our domino server, My employer does. I know that Domino is a very capable blog hosting system and there's plenty of blogs out there that use it... but, while I'm reasonably sure that my employer wouldn't be too concerned about hosting a small blog I'm not willing to take the risk. blogger.com is free, flexible and works rather well, so I'm happy enough here. What is this RSS stuff and what is it good for? Put simply, RSS is a way of downloading the headings and a small extract of text on blog sites. If you have an RSS Reader, then you can easily look through the recent postings without them cluttering up your mailbox. Where can I get an RSS Feed Reader? You can get these apps all over the net, but in my case I wanted a Lotus Notes based one. I looked a few Lotus Notes RSS Feed Readers and finally settled on one called News Miner from Digital Insites . This produc

Upgrading to Lotus Domino Release 7.0.1

This morning I upgraded our 2 servers and my workstation to Release 7.0.1 of IBM Lotus Domino and IBM Lotus Notes respectively. All went well. The Reason for the Upgrade Normally, I don't like to stay too close to the current version of software, but these days it's starting to look essential. My only reason for upgrading was to comply with a number of security advisories. I've listed the security issues below. All are fixed by version 7.0.1. Domino iNotes Client Script Insertion Vulnerabilities Notes HTML Speed Reader Link Buffer Overflows Notes Multiple Archive Handling Directory Traversal Notes TAR Reader File Extraction Buffer Overflow Notes UUE File Handling Buffer Overflow Notes ZIP File Handling Buffer Overflow The Upgrade Process I received the Advisories by email yesterday and went looking for them on the IBM site. Strangely enough, this is the first time that I've ever managed to find the correct Domino downloads on the IBM site, either their delivery mech

Installing Lotus Instant Messaging Limited Use for Domino 7

Another great? Idea This morning I decided that now that our Domino 7 server was working nicely, I'd start installing the extended features, instant messaging, DB2 etc... First up, was instant messaging. I spent a while looking on Notes.net to see what I had to worry about. The first thing I discovered was that the instant messaging facility is NOT built-into Domino 7 server, but is available by installing the limited use Sametime product. Luckily I'd spent a while obtaining the CDs from IBM and didn't have to try to find the product on their web site. The next thing I noticed was that it recommended that the sametime server be run on different hardware. It didn't give a reason, just a recommendation. I'm not sure why, though I did notice one alarmist posting suggesting that it "screws around with the address book settings" - technical terms indeed. I was thinking about running it on our normal server, since we only have 24 users internally and I didn'

Lotus Domino 6.5.4 upgrade to Version 7.0

This morning I decided to upgrade our Notes server, well actually I decided last night but wanted to wait until the backup was complete. I'd decided to record the procedure here. I would have recorded it internally anyway but I figure this might be of use to someone. Lets hope it works, because I'm writing this "live" as it happens. Precautions The backup ran last night, and I've checked it on the server.Yep, it looks like all of the notes/domino stuff is there.This is a Friday tape (Friday B) which means that it wont be overwritten for another 4 weeks. it should be ample time to test the new system for problems. If there is any doubt at the 4 week mark, I can always replace the Friday B tape with a new one. Hard Drive Space These are the figures from Drive D: Before the Upgrade. Used Space = 29.4 GB Free Space = 165 GB Total Capacity = 195 GB Procedure 1. Make sure that you put the Domino 7 CD into the drive the night before (when you were at work) - and do it be