Real World Computing

I am a big fan of remote desktop and use it for all sorts of things with notable examples being; Starting large downloads (eg: Domino 8) from Home to my work PC Running MS Project on our Presentations Equipment even though it isn't loaded there. Getting better speed in Lotus Notes when I'm using the system remotely. It was only a matter of time before I tried to get it working on the BlackBerry. I investigated a couple of companies but they weren't very helpful and I had problems getting their software to work. I specifically wanted Remote Desktop, not VNC - as remote desktop is built-in to Windows. Eventually I found a company called Idokorro and their software worked first time. What's great about this software is that given that our Blackberry Enterprise Server is inside our Corporate Firewall I can access my desktop PC without having to use VPN and without weakening our firewall. One note: On the standard BlackBerry Enterprise Server settings I got the following ...

A bit about our Off-site Server Project The aim of this project was always to have an off-site server that was capable of providing us with alternative facilities in the event of a disaster. My employers were on Domino before I started working here (7 years ago) and many of our oldest databases are in relatively "untouched" form. One of the biggest challenges of our off-site server project was always going to be the detection and removal of server-name hard-coding. Discovering all those server names was a tedious business which I won't go into here. This blog entry will provide you with one bit of code we used to replace a single-line server name. We used several different methods but this method is interesting in that it provides an alternative when the server is local. Getting the Server Name itself Generally, getting the server name in a late-domino server is quite easy. There's an @function (@ServerName) for it from R6 onwards, and prior to that it was acce...

We migrated our off-site server back on-site last Friday night and once again we were thrown by this setting. For this reason, I'll explain it a little. The Symptoms The most obvious symptoms of this value being incorrectly set are; a. Mail routes internally happily. b. Inbound internet mail is working fine c. Outbound internet mail is not working d. Other externally visible services generated by the server (eg: http) are visible on web. Some of the Domino server console error messages you may see if this is wrongly configured include; DNS Not Implemented Messages about Relaying being Denied or Relay Hosts No messages transferred to xxxxx via SMTP: SMTP Protocol Returned a Transient Error Where is it? The setting in question lives in the Server Configuration documents on the Router/SMTP and then Basics tabs. The actual name of the setting is: " Relay Host for messages leaving the Local Internet Domain ". What should it be set to? This depends mightily on your configurat...

I wasn't terribly excited about the prospect of getting a Blackberry server especially at this technically "crowded" time of my life but now I'm fairly convinced about the technology. Before I join the converted and start spouting the virtues of the blackberry system, I first want to go over some of the bad bits - chances are I'm not likely to look back at them. The Bad Bits The Telstra people who sold us the system told us that you could use any pc running the Lotus Notes Client - this is wrong... Beware: The Blackberry Enterprise Server is expensive, though not necessarily in terms of the Blackberry software. In order to run Blackberry Enterprise Server (for Notes/Domino) you will need; A reasonably powerful PC or Server, they recommended 4GHz but realistically it can be a little lower in spec. Lotus Domino Enterprise server - yup - now that is a serious extra expense if you don't want it running on your production server A fair amount of hard drive space....