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Showing posts from 2009

My thoughts on the IT Year in Review

I'd like to say that I've reached the end of our changes, fixes and upgrades for the year but it's simply not true. Work is increasing drastically as we try to make use of the "quiet business period" to install new systems and have outages. Look out for a bunch of posts early in the new year to describe some of the best and worst of our installations. In the meantime, it's Christmas eve. Instead of doing a completely off-topic post about a holiday which might not appeal to all my readers, I thought I might wrap up the year with my "layman's" (generally ignoring the finances) perception of how the computing giants have performed this year. In the meantime, if you're accepting well-wishes for the season, you have mine. Quick Disclaimer: Everything here is my own personal thoughts - so don't place too much reliance on it - and don't try to sue me. We're all entitled to our thoughts, so get over it. 2009 has been an amazing year in

How to block your number (for Caller ID) on the Blackberry Bold 9000

I was asked to help someone with this today and I spent ages searching for the option (because it's not in the obvious place). I didn't get a lot of help online either, so I thought I'd put a post out there to fill in the gap. It's not on the spanner icon (settings) where you'd expect it to be. Procedure From the front screen of your Blackberry Push the green phone button Push the blackberry button Scroll through the menu to find "Options" Choose "General Options" Scroll down to "Show my Number" If it says, Yes, then your caller id displays when you ring people. If no, then it doesn't. Change it to whatever you want by pushing the pearl Push the Blackberry button and choose Save. It should take effect immediately. Bear in mind though that lots of people won't accept calls from unlisted numbers - though if you're having trouble getting people to accept calls from YOU on a listed number, maybe going unlisted is a better opti

Notes 8.5.1 Attachment Issue - Help?

I've been chasing a simple attachment issue in Lotus Notes 8.5.1 with IBM support for a while now but we're not really getting "engagement" yet. I thought I'd document it and see if we're the only ones with this problem. The Problem What we've discovered is that if we attach a file using a Lotus Notes 8.5.1 client, everything behaves as per normal in the Notes client but if we use a web browser to look at the NotesDocument, the file name disappears. It's best illustrated. On the left, you can see how the attachment renders in the Notes client using a standard discussion database. On the right, you can see how it renders in the web browser. There is no filename. It's not white-on-white, it's simply not there. Our Parameters It only happens when we use Lotus Notes 8.5.1 clients, but it's not a problem with 8.5 I've only tested the problem on Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 It happens on lots of computers, regardless of brand, conf

Twice in One Week - Disaster Recovery beyond our Control

It has been a busy week for disaster recovery so far - we had an outage on Monday and we had another one today. Monday's Email Outage On Monday, we lost our e-mail services. No, it had nothing to do with the Lotus Domino server. That was fine. At first, it looked as if we'd forgotten to renew our domain name. This was quickly followed with a back and forward check of various DNS services out there on the Web, our domain registrar and our Internet service providers. All seemed ok with our domain name but there was definitely something weird happening. Eventually we discovered that our Internet service provider had their DNS running off a domain which they had forgotten to renew. Since they were providing our primary DNS, all of our inbound mail was getting confused when it went to resolve our domain. After being told by us (yes, they were unaware of the situation despite the fact that it had occurred during the night and it wasn't noticed immediately in the morning), th

With friends like these... (Business Partners and support)

Some time ago, Graham Dodge posted a great discussion point on business partners and brand loyalty. (See: When is an IBM Business Partner not a real partner ). Today, I got to experience this first hand. Today, we had a discussion about Active Directory. It's something we need to install, mainly to tick the business continuity box, and not something I'm particularly keen on. It's a messy rip and replace job with very little business gain. As is often the case for Microsoft products, there's no upgrade path. That's right, we're going from Old Microsoft product to New Microsoft product and the only way to do it is to throw our baby out with the bathwater and start again. I'm not happy, but it's no worse than I expected. Messy Introductions Our contact arrived during a painful ISP outage (more on those amazing adventures in a different post - soon). We explained about the outage and he started telling us about how he'd been head hunted by them and

What is wrong with IBM's Definition of Free?

I don't want to come over sounding "all negative", after all my last few posts were (justifiable) rants about installation issues but there IS something wrong with IBM's definition of FREE. It's not the product. Both Lotus Notes and Symphony are great full-featured products. The problem is the fact that IBM is obviously very uncomfortable with giving things away for nothing. I'm reminded of the sort of routine you see all the time on sitcoms, where one person gives another a gift but refuses to let go. There's that awkward silence and then, after what seems an eternity, the gift-giver finally let's go. Compare this to the Google approach of showering you with gifts when you walk in the door. I'm not suggesting that IBM should be like Google. Much as I admire Google, I can't help but think that their business model is ultimately flawed. Eventually, the rain of free goodies will have to stop if they want to turn a profit. So, where and how co

IBM Lotus Notes Designer 8.5.1 Installation Issues Update

I finally got to the bottom of the problems with the 8.5.1 installation and I believe that they're related to my use of the Google Chrome Web Browser. The Hard Way At work, after five unsuccessful uninstalls and reinstalls of Notes 8.5.1 (with some - always successful - reinstalls of 8.5 in between), I finally did two things. Switched my primary web browser back to Internet Explorer (don't worry, I didn't actually use it for the duration). Decided not to reinstall the single-signon service. It worked!! I later switched back to Chrome and then reinstalled (did a repair) to add Single Signon. It still worked. I was in business. The Easy Way Once I was on 8.5.1 at work, I decided it was time to update my home computer. I don't have single signon there, but I do have Chrome as my default browser. I wasn't expecting the same installation issues to occur but they did. It's obviously Chrome. This time, I decided to try a different approach. Following an anonymous

IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.1: An Update and Reinstall No 5.

Knowing (hoping) that I will receive a call from IBM today to follow up on my Lotus Notes client installation issues, I figured that I had better go back to 8.5.1. Of course, this means that I have to survive the entire day without designer. This time, I decided to make a note of my steps. They are as follows; Part 1: Knocking the Old One Off Start, control panel Go to add remove programs and remove Lotus Notes Close everything down... literally everything, notepad, chrome the whole lot. The removal took 9 minutes and this was with my antivirus and firewall shutdown. I then went searching through the file system to locate any old directories which may have contained Lotus software. I found one on my profile under application data and I found another under program files. I deleted both of these. I also killed my old installation files. After this, I started the registry editor and did a search for "Lotus". I killed the majority of entries except for those which were obviously

Installing IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.1 - Or Maybe not

I've just had a terrible user experience this morning with four failed attempts to install IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.1. I'm usually not one to give up but I have lots of work to do, so I'm going back to my old faithful 8.5. I'm not the only one either it seems. I've talked to a few others and I've had a good look around the internet. There seems to be a very high percentage of people with 8.5.1 installation problems. The problems themselves are varied. In my case, I got the core product working (after an extremely long installation - that bit, apparently, is common to everyone) but although I got the Administrator client running, the designer (and really my only reason for interest in the upgrade), simply refused to start. Other people seem to have different problems and indeed there's a whole list of them in the comments on vowe.net. ( http://vowe.net/archives/010922.html ). I tried uninstalling, deleting folders, running NotesKill and a whole host of other

How to Create a Bootable DVD Using Nero Burning ROM 9

I often need to create bootable CDs and DVDs but it's weird because I frequently end up buring myself a new coaster instead. It's not that the process is difficult, just that nero has a few too many options and I forget which ones to choose and end up picking the wrong one. I figured that the best way to avoid this mistake in future would be to write the steps down. Procedure Insert CD or DVD into your DVD Burner. Start Nero Burning ROM 9 Choose DVD-ROM (Boot) or CD-ROM (Boot) depending on what you're creating You'll be prompted for a disk image source. Choose a Nero Source - you'll usually find them somewhere like this... C:\Program Files\Nero\Nero9\Nero Burning Rom\DOSBootImage.ima Leave the Boot Locale as English - unless you really need a different keyboard layout Tick the box marked [X] Enable Expert Settings Choose Hard Drive Emulation and leave any other settings as they are. Click the button marked New Add any files you want but don't try to add operati

YellowDay 2009 - What do I use Domino for - and why is it great?

It's officially YELLOW DAY today and that means that it's time to talk about IBM/Lotus Domino. I suppose I really should give some tips but offhand I can't think of anything that I'm sure most people don't already know. Instead, I'm going to talk about how I'm using Lotus Notes/Domino and why I believe that it's still relevant today... and into the future. Bias First of all, I'll state my bias. It's worth a history lesson. I first got involved with Lotus Notes with version 3 on Windows 3.0 (on Novell). I didn't like the product much then but my boss had seen some demonstrations and decided that it was the future. It wasn't long before I stumbled upon the biggest bugbear of Lotus Notes - and a problem which still dogs it today... What the %#@* is it ? Today, I still don't rightly know. There are a million answers to this question which depend widely upon your usage but to me, it's always going to be the "swiss army knife

Preventing Domino from Filling up the C: Drive

I love learning new stuff, though usually I prefer not to learn about new things during disaster recovery, particularly if they're the cause of the problem. Today, I learned something new about Domino. Keeping Domino off C: Drive. We all know about keeping domino off the C: Drive of our servers. It's one of the first things you learn when setting up any windows server, Keep the operating system on C: drive and put the apps and/or data on D: drive. It is possible to put Domino on C: and point the data directory to D:. I've heard of people doing that in the past but it's not really something I'd like to do. For a start, there's the crashdumps... Since they vary a little from one release to the next, how do I know where they're going to be stored? If you fill up D: drive, the applications and users will experience some irritation. If you fill up the C: drive, your server is dead. You'll have to move data under less than ideal conditions. So, my genera

Where have the cool "Powered by Domino" Logos gone?

I was making a couple of changes to our sites on the domino server and I decided to update the "Powered by Domino" button. So, I did a quick google image search and came up with .... nothing. Anyway, not being someone who lets unavailabilty of things stop me, I quickly made my own; Of course, my art skills aren't anything to rave about... but if anyone wants it, feel free to grab it and use it. IBM... how about some buttons done by professionals?

How to Send a Rich HTML Newsletter Email via Your Domino Server

Recently, the company I work for decided that they wanted to send out an electronic newsletter with a nicely rendered html email. We got some offsite designers to provide us with a html file but it just wouldn't render correctly when sent from Lotus Notes. We were creating the email by creating a new memo then putting the cursor in the body and selecting File, Import. The resulting import was close, but not perfect. On a whim, I downloaded Mozilla Thunderbird (it will be a cold day in hell before I use outlook), and set up the outgoing mail server as a SMTP server with our domino server's address. I ignored the POP settings because I wasn't trying to get inbound email. Finally, I tweaked the from address on the email so that it would come from our domain and sent it to our distribution group. The mail went smoothly and correctly formatted. Since my "from address" was an internal mailbox, all replies/bounces will go to that address. People often forget that you

How to Write from Domino to File Servers without Extended Rights

The Problem We have a file on our data file server which is used by our Microsoft Word templates to generate a whole bunch of different documents. Until recently, updates to this file have been mostly manual but now we're getting one of our new systems to perform them directly. The problem is that the file is on a different share and a different server. The agent runs fine manually but when it runs on the server, it fails. BTW: All our data servers and domino servers are currently Microsoft Windows Server 2003. Why it Fails It doesn't matter who is logged onto your domino server when you're write out a file from an agent running on the domino server because it won't be using their credentials. Since Domino is running as a service, it will be running using a different set of credentials entirely - most likely; "System". Since "System" is a local (to the server) user rather than a domain/directory user, you can't grant it access to the rest of

My Experience (Nightmare?) with DELL

I'm not a person who does a whole lot of product bashing here on my blog but right now, I'm pretty miffed with DELL and it will be a cold day in hell before I give them yet another chance. My first Intel/AMD PC was an IBM XT and I was pretty happy with it at the time. A few years later when IBM went down the Microchannel route, their brand name got so dirty that I thought I'd never see myself going back to it. I was therefore quite surprised when their hardware turnaround (they abandoned microchannel and came back to the fold) produced such great devices. I stuck with IBM until they stopped making PCs - and never regretted a minute of them. Those were classy machines. When IBM sold out to Lenovo, I had to find another brand name. It's fine to buy some brandless junk for home but when you've got a business to support, a brand name is everything - and they usually come with a SLA. Unfortunately, there weren't many brands left in the PC market. I decided to g

How to Add a "Contact Me" Form to your Blog (or Website) without exposing your Email Address

A long time ago, it was common practice to simply put your email address on the web using a mailto url link. Unfortunately, this practice results in a ton of spam coming your way courtesy of spambots. A Potted History of Methods Over the years, a lot of different methods for getting around this problem have become available. These include the low tech methods, such as having text which reads " send email to myaccount at hotmail dot com " and needs to be reinterpreted by the reader. The use of escape codes (try http://www.mways.co.uk/prog/hidemail.php for an example), and several other ways of encoding the address in javascript. No method has been more successful than simply giving people a blank form to write their email in. Now, in Lotus Notes/Domino, this is simplicity itself but when it comes to html, you need to write a bit of code - and even then, you need to be careful not to expose anything on the web. Getting External Help It makes no sense to reinvent the wheel wh

Lotus Foundations in Australia

After a seemingly interminable wait from IBM, it looks like Foundations is finally released (and moving) within Australia. This article from Australian IT looks at the benefits and low cost of implementing the solution. Flexible EPSI takes the Lotus Position http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,,25462866-24169,00.html If I were starting out with a small business, there's no question as to what I'd be recommending because unlike the competing products, IBM Lotus Foundations will give tech-savvy businesses room to grow. Their comments on the use of a hosting solution (which would be one of my other choices) are particularly interesting; "We went to the shared environment, but we grew reasonably quickly and it just became more expensive as every licence was a lot more money and the bandwidth we were consuming was costing us money," EPSI co-founder Nigel Wilson says. "We wanted more flexibility to do more things, and this hosting organisation was just not set

Trusting the New Document Formats

Today, I read a brilliant article; Update on ODF Spreadsheet Interoperability http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/update-on-odf-spreadsheet.html Rob Weir has repeated a series of tests he did a couple of months ago. This time on updated software. Specifically, he's testing to see how well spreadsheets transport (with their formulae intact) between the various Open Document Format (ODF) compatible applications. The results of his earlier tests were quite encouraging and it was exciting to see that Microsoft were coming to the party with Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 offering support. But what kind of support exactly? Well, it turns out that they're VERY incompatible and very dangerous too. They happily import values into Excel but they lose all the formulae. Nasty. Imagine importing a critical financial spreadsheet without knowing that the formulae are gone. There's a couple of Notes on the site for IBM Lotus Symphony to correct but since they concern the beta releas

A Microsoft/Dell Glitch Inspires some Creative Linux (GOS) Work

A bit of Dell and Microsoft Bashing This morning when I arrived at work, my computer had installed a Microsoft Windows XP update (for Office 2007, which isn't even installed on my PC - it's running 2003) and rebooted. The result was that my screen was now partially blurry. Something had screwed around with the video drivers. I wasn't sure if it was a problem with the video card or the monitor but there's an easy way to find out. I booted from a handy Ubuntu boot CD (my trusty Bart PE didn't seem to work on the DELL). These boot CDs are brilliant. They let you get work done without having to install an operating system. In my case, I was able to connect to the network and open some large documents to assure myself that the monitor blurriness was gone. When I booted back into Windows, the blur came back too. I called DELL and explained my actions and was given the extremely helpful advice (NOT), that since it was obviously not a monitor or video card problem,

Spouting Gobbledygook (IBM Licensing)

All companies have internal buzzwords and gobbledygook but most are fairly conscious about providing an intermediary translation before shooting it off to their customers. This little gem? from IBM was so bizarre that I felt it was worth sharing; I received an email today indicating that IBM had decided to make some changes to their licensing. As a customer, I try to be careful about reading such things because sometimes they highlight problems and sometimes they give us extra benefits. The email consisted of a two page "covering letter". The first page of which said very little other than suggesting that a licence change was happening and giving a rough date. It pointed you to the attached document (the second page). The first paragraph just tells you very little other than identifying that it's to do with IBM's Passport Agreement Programme (I'd already figured that part out). It's the second paraphaph that prompted this post. I've reproduced it in

Registering and Deregistering the Lotus Domino Server Service

The Scenario We have a test server which is used for development test purposes only. It was set up with Domino on the C: drive (which normally I prefer to keep clean for the operating system). Domino was apparently later installed on D: drive but the old installation was not removed and the Lotus Domino Server service remained in startup. As a result of the old service still being installed, the new one did not get installed - I'm not sure if this was a notes problem or if the person doing the installation had "cheated" and simply copied the folders to the new drive. It was only a test server after all. Regardless of the cause, the issues became; There was an old service which was disabled To prevent the wrong domino server from accidentally being started, the folder C:\Lotus was renmed to C:\Old-Lotus. The New Service was not installed This meant that everytime the server was rebooted, the domino service had to be restarted manually - and also, whomever started the D