pmooney.net

Bill and Paul’s damp adventure (in Photos)

pmooneynet — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 17:31:25 +0000

As blogged, we decided to head to NLLUG on two wheels, just for a change. The weather for the past few weeks had been good, and fingers were crossed that it would hold.

Obviously the wrong fingers. At one point the night before heading off, the flood/storm/you must be fucking nuts warnings were taking hold and I was going to just book flights for the Thursday. But, decided to wait until the morning.

5am – Get up in Belfast. Weather looks ok. Wind is now not at hurricane strength and rain was manageable.

5.30am - On the road from Belfast to Larne. Very dark, lots of trucks. Lots of water on the road. Not fun but ok.

7.00am – Ferry to Troon. Said goodbye to Larne.

Two hours later – said hello to Scotland.

A distinct lack of sunshine, dryness and/or heat. Compensated by a sideways wind that was ‘interesting’. Onwards to Dalkeith via Glasgow and Edinburgh and finally a very damp arrival at our meeting point. Bill turned up later own, trying his best to impersonate a mermaid. If you look closely enough you will see the waterline on his t-shirt.

Onwards to Newcastle, where it changed from rain to downpour for about an hour. In fact, it just stopped raining about 4 miles away from the ferry, where we stopped to shake off water.

After that, the sun shone as we entered the ferry, ditched the bikes and the gear and went straight to a bar on the rooftop.

Food was great, entertainment was.. well. Here is a few seconds (after the bingo).

Bed by 10pm. So tired that Buchan’s snoring only work me 4 times. Awake to see the sky had decided to barf pure fluid on us for the last part of the outward trip. Here is me at the same bar from earlier.

Leaving the boat took a while as I was trying to figure out how to unstrap my bike…

…and muppets at the front of the bike queue turned up after we were all ready to leave, but then the interesting rain, traffic and sat nav instructions on my iPhone got us eventually to our hotel, where our bikes and us are drying out. Onwards to the conference!

Domino 8.5.2IF1 available

pmooneynet — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 13:56:14 +0000

A quick look at fixcentral and the information confirms what was expected. IF1, (on server called HF16) is related to below.

After upgrading to Lotus Domino 8.5.2, users stop receiving SMTP mail. Your Domino server CPU spikes on SMTP and may appear to be hung.

The “show tasks” command may show the following thread. You may see numerous SMTP threads or a single SMTP thread:

Server.Task = SMTP Server: Providing service for 123.45.678.910
Server.Task = SMTP Server: Providing service for 123.45.678.911
Server.Task = SMTP Server: Providing service for 123.45.678.912

nSMTP can spike the CPU anywhere from 50% to 100%.

This is caused by a specific SMTP message where we see 50-100% CPU, depending on the platform.

Restarting the Domino server may resolve the hung task temporarily, but it is possible that another message will get stuck and the CPU will spike and appear to be hung again.

I have upgraded test servers and just the two files below get replaced.

Not upgraded a production server yet, but I am reasonably confident that this is now sorted as it was a show-stopper for some sites.

Warning about multiple traveler installations in your domain

pmooneynet — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 16:00:11 +0000

I like traveler. In fact, I really like traveler. It’s one of the first products that Lotus released that “just worked” out of the box in years. And its great. So please don’t take this as a bitchfest.

Traveler uses mapping databases (under Data\Traveler\map\*.nsf) for device mapping. Based on my earlier post today and the error I had, I did a little more digging into three other domino domains just to confirm one thing. These databases are all replicas by default. The install places the databases in the directory (i.e. no template based creation). This could cause you not problems at all, or if you have multiple traveler installations, this could cause you lots of problems.

The correct way to deal with this would be to have each install create a random rep id for each database, with the option to use replicas if you wish.

Take a look at my earlier post. The error I had was directly related to replication of two domino traveler servers (albeit in a very non-standard environment).

Heading to NLLUG this week. Not the usual way.

pmooneynet — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 13:38:09 +0000

NLLUG is on this week, and considering the speaker line-up, agenda and planning being undertaken, this is going to be a fantastic event. I will be there to present a session on DAOS and also my Adminblast session from Lotusphere 2010. This is my first time speaking at an event this year (Lotusphere excluded) so I feel like I haven’t been doing enough on this front. With NLLUG, Admincamp and ILUG before the end of the year, I should be back in presentation form for Lotusphere, if I get a session.

That said, I’m not taking a plane to NLLUG. A few months ago Bill Buchan and I made a plan to head to NLLUG on bike, so that’s what we are doing. In the morning (at shit o’clock am) I head to Larne harbour to catch a ferry to Troon.

View Larger Map

From there, it is a cross country trip to Dalkeith (south of Edinburgh) to meet Buchan.

View Larger Map

From there, it’s onto Newcastle for the ferry to Amsterdam.

View Larger Map
It’s an overnight ferry so Bill and I will be sharing a berth. I will need to be drunk. If you don’t know why, just ask Bill about last time we shared a room. The next morning, we cock about Holland for a few hours then head to NLLUG HQ to help in any way we can. Just like ILUG, these guys don’t get paid for their time, so help is always appreciated.

So, if you are in the vicinity, you should pop in to a fantastic looking event. If not, feel free to follow me on twitter and/or latitude and we will try to photo-blog our mid-size jaunt.

Have you looked at Google Latitude recently?

pmooneynet — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 12:54:21 +0000

The Google latitude dashboard has come a long way over the past year. Now the history module parses out your information and gives you some interesting travel statistics. Don’t forget Google Latitude is as public or as private as you wish it to be. I relatively “open” on this and have a widget showing what city I am in on my website. But this can be locked down or opened up much further. In fact, I can see Google taking Tripit on in the near future.

Take a look. And if you want to try it out, you can always track me for a while. At the moment, it is rare I am in the same place for more then a few days.

Verbatim SSD Express card update

pmooneynet — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 12:07:25 +0000

My purchase is now winging it’s little way back to Amazon for a refund after a very short and honest call with Verbatim support this morning. The technician said she has had a number of calls regarding the cards not working and suggested I return for a replacement or refund. Of course, by the tone of her voice, a replacement would just be a waste of time.

Lotus Traveler 852 upgrade error

pmooneynet — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 08:53:10 +0000

I will start by saying this shouldn’t happen in most sites. In Bluewave, we run lab servers with different versions of Domino, Traveler, Sametime, Quickr, WAS etc etc etc and we are most assuradly non-standard setups. After upgrading our Traveler server (which is also our BES server… again unsupported but works) to 852 it stopped working. NTSError log files had variations on the following:

Lotus Notes Traveler version: 8.5.2.0 Build 201008051106 running on Lotus Domino server Release 8.5.2|August 10, 2010 on a Windows/32 platform
[08/31 21:14:52.406] SEVERE main *system NTSConfig.updateMapDBAccessControlList#847 Exception caught during Lotus Traveler configuration. Exception Thrown: Notes Exception(4005) : Notes error: You are not authorized to perform that operation (JournalEntryMap.nsf)
Exception Thrown: Notes Exception(4005) : Notes error: You are not authorized to perform that operation (JournalEntryMap.nsf)NotesException: Notes error: You are not authorized to perform that operation (JournalEntryMap.nsf)
at lotus.domino.local.ACL.save(Unknown Source)
at com.lotus.sync.admin.NTSConfig.updateACL(NTSConfig.java:884)
at com.lotus.sync.admin.NTSConfig.updateMap

DBAccessControlList(NTSConfig.java:835)
at com.lotus.sync.admin.NTSConfig.initConfig(NTSConfig.java:448)
at com.lotus.sync.admin.MainTask.init(MainTask.java:966)
at com.lotus.sync.admin.MainTask.main(MainTask.java:1227)

The problem was related to the databases in the \data\traveler\map directory, which control mapping of fields. The Traveler server itself did not have rights to the databases post upgrade. What caused this?

Replication. Another server in the domain, running traveler had replicated and screwed with ACL’s. Re-adding the local server to the ACL resolved the issue, but if you have a large traveler deployment, you may want to look at new replica ids or watching ACL’s post replication.

Verbatim Express card SSD woes

pmooneynet — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:48:30 +0000

My 2 year old Macbook pro is still a very capable laptop. I don’t have the affection for it that I do for my blackbook but it churns away all the time, being my only computer for daily use.

Multiple VMs running Active Directory, SQL2005, Domino do hurt performance though. For a short term fix, I ordered a Verbatim 32MBGB SSD Express Card, taking advantage of the express slot on the side for the first time. Plan is to run a vm on it and leave the local disk for other things.

Here are the steps taken:

Open package
Read instructions
Download drive from Verbatim site
Install driver and reboot
Insert card

Easy eh? Well no. Errors copying to the card and so far 4 total system freezes. So, go into disk utility and try to re-partition the drive in every format, and get these type of errors:

So I go to their support page, click here and click on “your questions answered”. And get a big fat emptiness. Nice. Call support line. eMail support at lunch. No response. Call support this evening. They are closed from 4pm CET.

Not a good start Verbatim. A cursory google search shows I am not alone.

Annoying

pmooneynet — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:17:38 +0000

Update to Time Machine that came out a few weeks ago had a high likelihood of wanting you to do this….

Strange email of the day…

pmooneynet — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:14:02 +0000