Real World Computing

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...

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...

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...

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?

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 ...

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 ...

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...