Write it on a Rock

I have a script that crawls the mail directory and logs the date, number of mailboxes and total space used along with writing out the user and size of their mail database on that particular date. I really don't know why I have (or want) this information but because I do have it I can tell you that on October 17, 2005, we had 461 email databases for a grand total of 69.54GB. Two year later that had grown to 532 email databases for a grand total of 219.9GB. A server program runs Mon-Fri that compacts our databases and reclaims the white space provided there's more then 10% but disk space was becoming an issue and I was very excited about the space savings potential in Domino 8.

To start taking advantage of the new compression available in Domino 8, I added the notes.ini line "Create_R8_Databases=1" to my servers on Thursday after I got LEI for iSeries downloaded and installed which brings my total to 6 out of 8 servers up and running on 8.0.1. This weekend I upgraded the mail databases by running the compact command with the -c option to bring them to the ODS48 format. Here's what our mail folder looked liked after the upgrade on Thursday and then this morning after the email databases were upgraded.




Amazing. That's about 28.3% savings with just the design compression enabled. I don't know how much I'd see with document data compression turned on as well but I'll keep you updated!

It would have taken A LOT less time had I not left a 5250 session up with the WRKDOMSVR command active but lesson learned for the next three servers on i5 to upgrade. =)

VERY excited to start upgrading a couple of mail files after some testing and marking some clustered databases Out of Service.

Still don't see LEI 8.0.1 for iSeries or system i so I can upgrade both of these clustered servers but this is a start!

I hope I'm just missing something. I see Windows, Windows 64 bit, AIX, Solaris and xSeries but nothing for the iSeries (system i). The server release for system i is queued up to download after the clients finish but not having LEI for this release for LEI will stop my planned upgrades. I can't find anything on IBM's website either but I've always had trouble finding anything I'm looking for on there.

I'm depressed.

[edit] It's in the release notes for LEI 8.0.1 that it's available for system i but still nothing on the Passport Advantage site.

For some reason, with the official announcement of Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0.1 being released tomorrow, I've decided to start blogging. I'd like to try and keep this focused mainly on Lotus related topics but I'm a big sports fan and an entertainment (books, movies, music, games) fan in general, so who knows what will show up.

No surprise to anyone who might actually read this post but IBM has announced the release of Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0.1 for tomorrow, Feb. 20, 2008. I first read about it here at Ed Brill's blog where he has a link back to IBM's site.

Currently I'm "managing" eight Domino servers, four on i5 boxes and four on Windows boxes, and the versions of Domino are scattered. The most up-to-date are two clustered servers on i5 that are running 7.0.3. The oldest release is the other i5 cluster running 6.5.4. Of the Windows servers, they are used as an Archive server, BES server, Sametime server and a Web Server. Our user base is around 600 with 90% using a Notes client - which are also on scattered releases.

I consider myself a designer (Nathan says we should say that instead of "developer" ) rather then an administrator but I'm lucky enough to do both. After Lotusphere this year I decided to try and start doing a better job on the administrative side and I've been waiting for this release to really begin doing that. Since I've been working with Notes and Domino we've never gone to a .0.0 release and have always waiting for a .0.1 release. This has been tough to do with version 8 as I have been dying to get Domino 8 on our servers. I've only played around a little on the Notes 8 client since 8.0.0 was released but I'm dying to start using that client as well.

As I'm sure many will do, I will be scrambling to download this release as fast as possible. Going to set one of the 7.0.3 servers into restricted mode so I can upgrade it as soon as I have the download tomorrow. Hopefully the install will be painless and I can get the other server in that cluster upgrading after some testing. I'll keep you posted.