Real World Computing

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...