Real World Computing

Yesterday, I posted about attending a Domino Jam for the first time in six years and my feelings on how HCL has turned the product around. Today I want to touch on the security aspect discussed at the Jam and add my thoughts to the mix.  Secure by Design Immediately following the roadmap presentation, the jam looked at Domino's legacy and where it is today. One of the key takeaways from this was a discussion of the incredible security in Domino. We have seen this in our organization but it was nice to hear HCL and other organizations (via quotes and stories) saying the same thing. There are many good reasons for the high security score but two of the best are  Multi-layered security from the very beginning of the product. Domino being "on-prem" rather than web hosted.  There were a couple of interesting stories and observations, including one about a penetration test on one of the new tools (Volt) where the auditors talked about the many layers of security in the Domino ...

KVMs and Multiple Computers In the old days before we had computers that spanned multiple monitors, we sometimes had multiple computers on our desks. We had dedicated switching hardware to do this called KVM (Keyboard/Video/Mouse) switches. These days, apart from PC setups, which are mostly done via cloning technology these days, there's not really a reason to have multiple computers on your desk.  At least, not until COVID-19 forced everyone to work from home and some of us found a need to switch between our home and work laptops with ease.  Not really wanting to purchase special hardware and extra cables, I looked for an alternative solution and found that Microsoft already had one. It's called Mouse without Borders. In this post, I just want to talk about getting it setup.  Installing Mouse without Borders There's quite a few options around for Virtual KVMs but why would you pay for one when Microsoft provides one of the best for free? Mouse ...

It's just over 12 months since we made our first forays into the Office 365 space and I'm convinced that we made the right call at the right time.  Any earlier and it would have been wrong because SharePoint hadn't gained traction and OWA was undeveloped. Any later and we'd have lost our unique position.as innovators in this space.  It hasn't all been smooth sailing and many of our legacy systems are still on IBM Domino. The approach to migration was rushed and flawed but I'm looking forward to 2018 when the dust settles and we can begin to move forward in a more orderly manner.  All things considered though, I'm proud to have been part of the technological achievements of the year which included a complete revamp of the hardware and software in the office; including the replacement of all desktops with Microsoft Surfaces and Apple MacBooks, the replacement of our meeting room systems with Microsoft's Surface Hub technology, an office move, a rebrandi...

We're currently testing Windows 7 - Not because we actually see a business need. It's not about support, applications or even new features. It's simply that it's too hard to buy PCs with Windows XP loaded on them these days. Over the last few months, I've learned one very valuable lesson: There is NO benefit in Windows 7 unless you go 64 bit! Of course, that doesn't mean that there are many 64 bit applications out there to run on it. Why is 64 bit so important for Windows 7? Well, like all new Microsoft Software, it uses a bit more disk space and a bit more memory that its predecessors. Unfortunately, there's a 2GB memory limit in 32 bit windows - and it still applies to Windows 7. That means that now Windows itself takes up more space but your maximum memory remains the same. Even if you have a PC with 4, 6 or 8GB RAM, 32-bit Windows will only use 2 GB. Windows 7 64-Bit is a different story but weirdly, the limits aren't imposed by the bit-space bu...

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, ...

Musings on What I'd do about my Partition Problem Yesterday afternoon, I spent a bit of time backing up my work PC so that I could try a few tricks to get the System partition larger. I keep all my data and apps on a different partition but nevertheless, they still like to dump files in the Windows directory on the sysetm partition. In addition, there's the fact that Windows Update keeps wanting to increase it's stranglehold on my C: Drive. I didn't want to do a reformat and reinstall because I would have to reinstall all of my apps too. I also didn't want to do an entire system image because that saves things in a proprietry format. I wanted to be able to get to my files on DVD if and when I wanted to. My Partition Troubles When I first installed Windows XP I figured that 10GB would be sufficient space - especially since I upgraded from Windows NT which had problems recognising system partitions over 10GB. How wrong was I? For the last few weeks, I've been enga...

Installing Domino 8.0.2 Yesterday, we did some tests on Domino 8.0.2. I wasn't expecting any real problems given the ease of the last few Domino upgrades - up to 7.0.2. I guess I was wrong. First of all, the initial attempt at installation failed with one of those non-specific error messages. I rebooted the server and tried again - no problems. I've seen this problem a few times though - it's something to do with the JVM being held open on Windows Server 2003 even though Domino itself has been closed. Upon starting Domino, I chose not to upgrade the designs of the databases. Ideally you should not upgrade the designs until your last production server is on at least the same "major" version - in this case, 8.x. I then did a bit of testing. As usual, I found no problems. Domino is one of the few systems I know which can be upgraded and tested (albeit roughly) in 15 minutes. The Problem Then I found the problem. Our most critical database refused to render web ...

Introduction Since the release of Google's new "web browser", Chrome yesterday the web has been buzzing with speculation about how Google will be hurting Mozilla. The funny thing is, that if you read the comic about Google chrome, you'll see that it is being positioned more as an operating system than as a browser. Cloud Computing The idea is that the Web browser will become the operating system of choice for cloud computing . The Google Chrome "browser" has certain advantages over the current generation of browsers, particularly in the area of robustness and multithreading. The browser changes are similar, in a way to the fundamental chanages from Windows 3.1 to Windows XP. Under Windows 3.1, all applications shared the same address space and one faulty application would result in the dreaded "General Protection Fault" message and would often pull the entire system down. I see that kind of behaviour all the time in Internet Explorer and slight...

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...

I used to be able to access the Domino server console by using Remote Desktop on the server but recently, the Console started to disappear. At first, I figured that it was something I'd done wrong, until I saw a post on the Notes 8 forum . It's a Windows XP Service Pack 3 issue; So, here's the fix; The command line parameter has changed and if your remote desktop icon for your domino server used to be as follows; mstsc -v: 10.12.2.2 -console you need to change it to: mstsc -v: 10.12.2.2 -admin ...following installation of XP service pack 3. Where 10.12.2.2 is the IP address of your server.

I recently saw a post about using third party software to display pictures and figured that this feature was worth reiterating. Windows XP comes with a built in screen saver called my pictures slideshow which does the trick nicely. There is no need to install third party software. Here is an easy way to configure this screen saver for simpler changes; First of all, you should create a folder on your hard drive where you will store pictures for your screensaver. In my case, I have stored them in G:\SaverPics. Screen Saver Installation Procedure Right mouse click onto your desktop background and choose properties from the pop-up menu In the display properties dialog box, click on the Tab marked screen saver . In the list of screen savers, select " My Pictures Slideshow " Click on the button marked settings . On the settings dialog, you can choose how frequently the pictures should change and how big they should become. I tend to prefer 100% of screen . You can click on Brow...

Yesterday morning we got a defunct drive on our main Domino server. No problem, I called IBM and they arranged to send out a replacement drive within 4 hours. We got the drive within about 3. (Good Job). I mentioned to my boss that although the drive was a hot-swap drive, there was a chance, however slight, that it could bring the server down. This is my standard disclaimer nowadays. Well, I removed the old drive and waited about 30 seconds before plugging in the new one. Instead of the expected rebuild operation, the RAID controller flagged the new drive as defunct and Windows Server 2003 obliged by giving me a blue screen of death. Great... I had a look at the packaging that IBM sent... Reconditioned Drives... not good. I don't begrudge IBM for using reconditioned parts but I think it is a little bit cheeky. At Any rate, following a call to IBM was told to update the firmware on the drives as the replacement drive have shipped with the very latest. Isn't that just a typi...

These days, it seems that just about everyone feels that they have the right to update your computer automatically and for the least important applications. But the questions need to be asked; Exactly how critical is the update and what will happen if I don't do it? How much testing has been done on the impact of this update on the applications I like to run? What is the update doing to my startup? Who gets to decide the timing and what warning is given? What will the application do to my network? I'm not going to attempt to answer these questions in this post. I'm basically just going to whinge and then post updates as I get my policy in order. At the moment, I don't know what the best answers are. The Microsoft Whinge Microsoft used to provide only important security updates as "critical" but they are now putting out all sorts of unwarranted updates, like Internet Explorer 7, via the automatic distribution system. The really annoying thing about Microsoft...

After obtaining some older hardware yesterday, we attempted to proceed with the Windows NT Domain Controller installation. Once again, our attempts ended in failure as we found the same problems as before (the network card needed service pack 3 or greater before it would install). Eventually, we ended up installing Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 server but not as a domain controller. We then used a product that we found on the Internet called UPromote to convert the server to a Backup Domain Controller. It worked, and our domain infrastructure is now safe for the moment... The one caveat with UPromote is that it prevents existing NT domains from being upgraded to active directories. I am not concerned with this limitation however as active directory should be designed and implemented from the ground up, not migrated from an existing NT domain.

Background Our company will shortly be moving office and as part of our pre-move testing, we need to give all of our servers a cold start. This doesn't guarantee that they will start at the new location but at least it proves that they have recently been able to cold boot. All of our servers, except one, are Microsoft Windows 2003 server. The one exception is a Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 server which acts as our Primary Domain Controller. We used to have a backup domain controller but when we were asked to move everything to Windows 2003, we lost the device. Windows 2003 server cannot provide Windows NT Domain services. If you need login services in Windows 2003, you are required to run Microsoft active directory. It was always our intention to put Microsoft active directory on our servers at the earliest possible opportunity and to remove the Windows NT server entirely. Unfortunately, we never got around to the job due to other work commitments and the amount of planning requi...

Ok, so the headline is probably a bit premature but I'm not talking globally, I'm talking about my own user experience. Some time ago, I was a major supporter of Internet Explorer and was urging people to abandon the various other browsers while meeting with stiff resistance from the Netscape camp. Eventually Microsoft won and we all went for Internet Explorer. Fast forward a few years and the unthinkable has happened - after about a couple of months of switching between browsers, I've finally abandoned the Microsoft camp for Firefox. So, was the decision the result of MS-Dislike? Was it because Firefox had better features? Nope. It was entirely based upon usability and reliability. Arguably the best marketing Firefox ever had was the release of Internet Explorer version 7. There are two reasons why this is the case; IE7 was widely touted as the "Firefox Killer". What this did was raise awareness that there was another solution out there. Sure, we all knew tha...

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...

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 ...