Lotus Nut

Just a quick note that we are planning some Connections server maintenance the morning of September 24 (tomorrow).

In the meantime, feel free to read over this. :)

Nope, I'm not talking about a blog for people into fast and furious 4 bangers (no offense to 4 banger drivers - like myself - who aren't fast or furious).

I'm talking about the new blog that IBMer Scott O'Keefe has started related to the Domino Configuration Tuner (DCT). You should go check it out at 'Tuner Blog. The first post is related to the "Check for Updates" option that's available with the template in which you can get the latest template from IBM as well as the latest updates to the rules. He also lists some of the new rules with the latest release.

You should really look into DCT if you haven't already. And with the 'Tuner Blog now active, I'm certain that Scott, et. al. will be looking for feedback!

By default, BES debug logs are enabled at installation. They are not only enabled, but they have no roll-off time specified. I have seen this cause drive space issues (not to mention performance issues associated with so many heavily fragmented small files...)

To remedy this, you can open the BlackBerry Server Configuration and go to the Logging tab. From there, you will need enable the "Debug log auto-roll" and specify the number of days you wish to keep the logs in the "Debug log maximum daily file age" settings. In the example below, we will only be keeping 30 days worth of logs. After restarting the BES task and all of the BlackBerry Services, the files will be automatically purged.



Some notes:

You may just wish to restart the entire server instead of each of the individual services.

The daily folders will still exist, so do not panic if you still see them. They will exist because of three log files. By default, all BB phone calls are also logged. This is how your phone call logs get restored when you activate a new device. There are also some 2 SMS and PIN messaging log files. These are empty files by default, but administrators can enable this logging (without you being aware of it, by the way - you did know this, right?).

So go ahead and clean up your BES servers and try to remember to modify these logging parameters when you install the server (note to self...).

In order to patch the guest and host servers with the newest critical Windows patch, we will have some brief downtime for all of the BleedYellow components tonight (that also includes Sametime...) This will occur sometime around 9PM Eastern.

Thanks!

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.

During the evening of Saturday, August 9, 2008 we will have some scheduled downtime for maintenance of all BleedYellow services.

 

Also, Sametime shouldn't be down for very long.

 

Thank you for your patience...

 

Cross-posted at BleedYellow Site Feedback