Lotus Nut

Or: Can I DAOSify a Server With < 8.5 Clients?

Recently I have had some colleagues and clients asking about updating a Domino Server to 8.5 and turning on DAOS while still running a mix of 6 and 7 Notes Clients. There is some confusion related to some upgrade seminars that are happening that appear to be using this slideshow. Here is slide 18 that is causing some confusion:


The last bullet is causing confusion. Of course "Domino 6 and 7 clients will not recognize DAOS" - even the 8.0.x client would fall into this category as it was released pre-DAOS - DAOS is a server feature. However, there are no known problems with using an older client against a DAOSified mail template. Here is why: the Domino Server is aware of DAOS. Any requests for an attachment from clients, servers, or services such as BES will be honored by the Domino server sending the attachment. The server will still have to get the nlo file and serve it to the requesting client (or server) over the wire. And, if you are running local replicas it does not matter either because the replica will be pulled down with all attachments inside the database.

Do I recommend a long-term strategy of having 6 and 7 clients with an 8.5 server? Negative. But you can immediately reap some benefits by upgrading your server and enabling DAOS while you are working on your client rollout strategy. And, as the slide above states, you'll need to wait until the clients are upgraded before you can update the template to mail85.ntf. Finally, DAOS is not just for mail databases. I have also sensed some confusion around this. Of course, in most environments, the mail store is where most databases would have duplicate attachments (either internal or shared) and most of DAOS's storage and i/o savings has been revolved around mail files.

Hopefully this helps!

Just thought I would remind everyone out there about the webadmin logo that IBM has been using over the years. Funny how close the 7.0 Beta 4 was to the actual Star Trek logo with the starship in the center. It was changed for the 7.0 GOLD release.

So, I wonder what IBM is trying to say about administrators?? By the way, I'm hoping to go see the new movie this week!

Several people have been blogging about using the (now-corrected) DAOS estimator tool. Feel free to add your savings calculations as a comment here or post them on your own blog!

Bruce Currier should be saving 49%!!
I had someone ping me with his results of saving 39%!
The third comment at Ed Brill's post on the Estimator tool reflects a 40% savings!
Almar Diehl blogged his results and will be seeing around 17% savings.

As demonstrated above, your mileage may vary with the savings...

A commenter at Bruce's blog (linked above) also noted that if you currently use a service to backup your mail databases offsite, then you should also be able to save a lot of money since you will be backing up much smaller NSF's.

And speaking of backups, make sure that you review the Backup and Restore considerations for DAOS!

Are you curious to see just how much space you will save with DAOS? Well, first of all, you do know what DAOS is, right? If not, here is some information.

IBM has released a tool that will analyze a set of databases you specify and compare the duplicate attachments to let you know how much space you can save after enabling DAOS. Here is a document on how to use the tool. And here is another document with the information on how to download the tool. The tool can run against 6.0+ servers.

So....how much will you save?

Prior to Domino 8.5, if you wanted to enforce custom notes.ini settings or location preferences you would have to modify the design of the Desktop Policy settings form to include $Pref or $LocAll fields, respectively. I know a lot of people who have shied away from doing this because they weren't "developers" and did not want to go into Designer and modify the Directory. With Domino 8.5 this has been made much simpler.

Just open the Desktop Policy settings form and go to the "Custom Settings" tab. This gives you the following:


From here, you can click "Edit list" to get the following dialog:


You can then add, modify, or remove the Notes.ini, Locations, and Managed settings.

"What is a 'Managed setting'?", you may ask. It is a setting that controls Eclipse plugin configurations. Here is some further information on Managed Settings. If you want to enforce Notes SSO with Sametime, you would have a setting that looks like this:


Thanks IBM - this is much simpler. Now, could we have lists in the value boxes with possible settings names?

Please check out Tim's blog for this exciting announcement for BleedYellow!!

BAKAAAWK! Announcing Squawk: Microblogging for Domino

A brand new addition to the BleedYellow portfolio is a "labs" version of a microblogging application for Domino called "Squawk". Although it has several integration points with Lotus Connections (for example, you do not need to register separately for this application - you can use your existing BleedYellow credentials - and your profile picture in Squawk is whatever picture, if any, you've uploaded to your BleedYellow profile), the application itself runs entirely on Domino....more

At the official IBM Domino Blog, Andrea Waugh-Metzger has asked for feedback on how you use (or don't use) Domino Policies. Here are the questions that you should go answer:

So, policies can really help make your administrative life much, much easier and can help you control a significant portion of your environment.  So let me ask you a couple questions...

1. Do you use policies in your organization today?
2. If so, how do you have them implemented?  Is it by OU?  By groups of users?  Or just one big policy?
3. What do you leverage policies for?
4. What would you like to see done with policies?
5. What questions do you have about policies and/or how they work?

I know that I've seen Domino Policies severely underused by most companies. So, do you use policies?

I would like to introduce you all to David Brown (that guy who sits beside me at work!) and his new blog Port 1352.

In response to: What is your typical database maintenance routine?

Regarding Compact, I had an entry I posted a while back related to fragmentation and compacting. In that, I actually recommended using something like a load compact -c +10. We all know that fragmentation causes very poor performance. However, defragging causes the databases to be even more fragmented because every new write will likely be to a non-contiguous block on the drive. I've been pondering this a lot more lately and thinking that allowing the 10% white space (like you mentioned) is actually a good idea. Something could even be accomplished by some code to add data to a database and then delete it so that there's white space. Then defragmenting that database (using something like defraggler, you can choose to just defrag a single file at a time) will yield a contiguous space that will not become fragmented very quickly. This, coupled with archiving, I believe can be a pretty good boost in i/o performance. I'm cross-posting this comment at my blog too for further thoughts...

Yeah, David beat me to it! I think there were a lot of concerns with previous versions related to DB integrity. So we still see a good many customers still running fixups fairly regularly (more than once per week). I don't guess this would hurt, but it would definitely cause a good bit of overhead for something that's pretty unnecessary.

I would like to inform you of a new blogger - Chad Scott. From his introductory post:


Chad also has a post related to some Issues in Notes and Domino 8.0.1 and how IBM is handling them.

Welcome Chad!

The other week I was made aware of something I did not know was possible. It turns out that the reason I never knew it was possible was that it is new with Domino 8. I found this out after attempting the trick on a Domino 7.0.3 server...

With previous releases of Domino, if you wanted to remove a line from the notes.ini, you had to manually edit the file. But now, with Domino 8, you can type set config Notes_ini_Setting= and this will remove the line completely. In previously releases, the line would still exist but it would just have a null value. Below is a screen capture of me doing this.



You can see that I show config to verify the entry exists. Then I set it to = null. Then I show config again and get "Invalid value for command option" (which means the entry does not exist. Finally, I set it back to its original value and show config again to validate that it exists.

Note: If you really want to make sure the entry is gone (and doesn't re-appear or stay enforced), be sure to look through your configuration documents and also remove the entry from the notes.ini section.

 Ed Brill points out that Sprint announces Mobile Email Work; access Lotus Domino or Exchange. This is really great news!I'm really glad to see that Sprint is going to have mobile mail available for Domino with around a dozen devices (including the ubiquitous RAZR). I will be interested to see how this actually works, technically. Sprint touts that this will be a "push" mail solution (See Nathan's post on push mail) and that software updates on the device will be forthcoming.

After going to the press release that Ed linked to, I clicked through a couple of pages and found that Sprint does have some more information about this at their website. Thankfully the press release (the item that will have the most hits!) mentions Lotus Domino because Sprint doesn't have a word about it at their mobile email site (at least not yet).  But I did see this at their site - specific mentioning of Exchange:



Sprint worked with Seven Networks to do this. Seven Networks has some info at their website that there is an Enterprise version available to work with Lotus Domino. I'm presuming that this is how Sprint will be licensing this. I know they've been around for a while, but I've never been familiar with their offerings. Perhaps others have some experience.

By the way, in the US, Seven Networks works with Alltel, AT&T, and Sprint. So the big news on Ed's blog is that Sprint actually mentioned Domino. There's nothing really specific that it appears Sprint is doing in this regard other than licensing and marketing their mobile email product running Seven Networks' software.

And while I'm sure the Instinct is a great device, I'm wondering if Apple already has that market cornered with the iPhone - especially whenever it is available on multiple networks. But time will only tell on that.

I just read this over at Kevin Hansen's blog:

This month, an Exchange server will go live in our organization. It will be connected to Domino to allow us to deliver iPhone services to our corporate users. We have a number of iPhones requested from our user community and more are sure to come.

Somehow, I don't believe this is they type of response to John Head's "Call to Action" that was anticipated. Kevin also states that this will be opening the door for more use of Exchange in his company and some likely migrations from Notes mail for certain groups.

It was asked at Ed Brill's blog if companies would seriously choose to move to Exchange just to support the iPhone - apparently the answer is yes. As I'm writing this, there are 367 signatures at the iPetition. This represents mobile users in the tens of thousands. Let us hope that more of these companies do not see more pressure to deliver push mail to iPhones.

I do believe that IBM is trying to get this all sorted with Apple - and much of it is out of IBM's hands. I have tested and provided some feedback on Lotus iNotes Ultralite. I think it is a good interim solution for those who need access to Domino mail from an iPhone. But, I think we all agree that it does not provide the desired long-term solution we all want for push mail and pim sync.

Further, to reiterate what Ed said, none of us really know how the Exchange services are going to work on the iPhone. There has been past debate about whether Exchange Server with Windows Mobile devices actually provides "push" mail. So will the iPhone implementation of this be more of a constant pull than a push? (Not that end-users actually care - they just want instant access to mail...)

I do not want to keep this debate going, but with the knowledge now that there are companies considering Exchange implementations to do this, we should keep this in mind.

One of the Domino Server security settings that I rarely see implemented is the option to "Enforce Server Access Settings". In the link, you can see that Ted describes the feature nicely.

With Quickr, you have the ability to grant access to places for people not listed in your directory. However, I have found that there is a "gotcha" when using this Domino security option if you also have the setting to only allow "Users listed in all trusted directories" checked in the Security tab of the Server document. Since the internal "place users" are not in your Domino Directory, they will not be able to log in.

But there is a way around this. With specific place users, they are created in the ACL as me@domain.com/placename/QP/DominoDomain. So this means that along with the "Users listed in all trusted directories" that you should be able to add */QP/DominoDomain to also be allowed to access the server.

Oh, and you'll also have to make sure that LocalDomainServers (or some other server group) has access to the server as well.

Domino 7.0.3 Fix Pack 1 is now available for download.

List of fixes for 7.0.3 Fix Pack 1

Information about Lotus Domino 7.0.3 Fix Pack 1

Download Fix Pack 1 (FP1) for IBM Lotus Domino 7.0.3