Real World Computing

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...

Well, I've been using Notes 8.5 since it was released now and I figured it was time to say a bit about it. First of all, after my disappointment with 8.0 (which was very slow) and 8.0.2 which was very unstable compared to 8.0.1, I have to say that 8.5 is rock-solid and "fast enough for me". You may remember that I posted an article on Using Ubuntu for Real where I said that I nearly had the whole thing working and that if it wasn't for the fact that I couldn't get Notes working on it, I'd have been happy to use Ubuntu as my OS. Well, things have changed. I took the Ubuntu version of Notes 8.5 home and (without any decent knowledge of Ubunutu - I've still never looked at a manual), I got it running in only a few minutes. The only hitch in the whole procedure was that the install wouldn't launch directly off my CD. I had to copy it to my desktop first. Impressive.... Really Impressive. In fact, the whole thing was so impressive that we stopped our ten...

(warning... this is rant - I know you're not supposed to blog about things when you're irritated but I've been irritated with McAfee for ages and it's not going away). My irritation with McAfee's Anti-Malware technologies has slowly been building for the past six months. For a start, I find myself disabling their firewall more often than I leave it enabled. The thing constantly tries to chew up 90+ percent of my systems resources. What's the point of having security software if, for usability reasons, you have to constantly turn it off? Whenever I start Lotus Notes 8.0.2, I have to remember to stop the McShield service (from the services part of control panel) before I double-click the icon. If I forget, my PC slows to a crawl and I can make filtered coffee and still get back with plenty of hourglass watching time. It would be easy to blame Notes for this but it performs so well when McAfee is off. In addition, several of my other bits of software perform mu...

Over the years I've made quite a few tests on Ubuntu to see whether it was ready for general consumption. Until now, it's never lasted more than a few hours on the device I've loaded it on because I've either had no time to test it properly or I've become too frustrated with driver setup problems to continue. This time, I loaded it on a laptop which just didn't seem able to run Windows XP. The results were astonishing. The Good For a start, the laptop which has 512 mb of ram runs quite well now. On XP SP2, it took literally about 5 minutes to boot, under Ubuntu, it take about 15 seconds. Google and Firefox Similarly, Firefox was already installed and all of my favourite google apps and bookmarks worked a treat. VPN and Remote Desktop I found some instructions for VPN setup and was remote desktopping onto my work PC within a few hours. Between Remote Desktop (to Windows) and the web apps that run in firefox - and of course Open Office which was also already i...

Today I downloaded and installed Google Chrome Beta from; http://www.google.com/chrome Installation The download was fast (it's a fairly small file) and installation is simple... Too simple in fact. It doesn't give you much choice about where you put things. There's also not much available in the way of configuration at the moment. What was nice is that it correctly recognised Mozilla Firefox 3 as my main browser and imported my bookmarks etc. One thing that may annoy is that it modifies the registry to run Google Update on Startup. When it starts, it gives you an option immediately, to change your search engine - or keep google, that's a nice touch. Google is obviously trying to appear as if they're not a monopoly. Disclaimer It's important to remember that this is a beta product and in no way represents the final finished product. General Look and Feel At this point it's very rough around the edges, though I'll admit that the tabs are nice - even i...

We recently bought a new server and replaced our trusty old main domino server. Some of my earlier posts covered this topic. Our users were understandably expecting a bit of a performance boost - not that domino had ever under-performed, but hey, if you spend over $20K AU on a new server, you're entitled to expect to see some benefits. Instead, the new server was slower than ever and we spent ages pondering the issue. I've been rather busy of late, so this is the first server at my workplace which I haven't personally been involved in building. We got an outside party to do it. That's my excuse anyway - though admittedly, I doubt that I'd have done much better using my normal server-building routine. Checking for the Cause There are a few places you should check if ever you have a server which is under-performing. Event Viewer You should always have a browse through here to make sure that there are no messages from failed services or drivers. A driver that is...