How do you filter Blue Care?

I do appreciate the effort IBM/Lotus goes to in keeping me informed of their plans. The Bluecare tool appeared in my email a few months ago and I happily installed it as a mechanism for keeping up to date with the happenings at BigBlue/Yellow.



Unfortunately the majority of the announcements aren't Yellow - they're about Rational, Tivoli and Websphere - all great products but not really where I'm at. (I have the same problem with my software distributor who keeps emailing about with the latest Cisco specials even though I've never sold hardware).

It would be great to have a product filter on the gadget where I could type "-Rational -Tivoli" etc but I haven't found that magic button yet. So I'm seriously considering uninstalling the Big Blue communicator and going back to reading the emailed announcements. Memory space on my computer (and in my head) is a precious resource and there's already enough add-ins competing for those resources without me wasting CPU cycles on products that I'm not certified for.
.

Backup software for Domino R8.5 servers

Yesterday I started working with a customer is having all sorts of troubles getting his integrated backup s/w to work with newly upgraded (R8.02 to R8.5) virtualized Domino servers. Now I'm not going to mention the backup s/w name at this point since negotiations are still underway with the vendor about what his documentation meant when he said it " ... supports Domino R8.x ", but I am interested in what experience other people have with backing up R8.5 Domino servers.

What software do you recommend and what do you curse?
.

@Remember(Lotus Foundations > Domino + Linux)

I've had a few requests for technical pointers over the last couple of weeks from people setting up their first Foundations server and there has been a common thread to all of these emails. Most of the people have been (more or less) experienced Domino Administrators who have looked on the Foundations environment as a cut-down SUSE Linux installation with a few extra bells and whistles, and they have been baffled by Foundations' refusal to respond positively to some standard Domino server commands. I went through some similar frustrating experiences for a while early last year until the penny dropped. I'd say it happens to everyone who has the "benefit" of already being a trained Domino Systems Administrator when they first install Lotus Foundations.

It doesn't work that way. Domino has been tailored to fit the Foundations environment. The two products are tightly bound together and you need to Read The Friendly Manual before you dive into administering Domino on a Foundations server. If you read far enough into the manual you'll probably find that your Domino administration tasks are already being done for you automatically by Lotus Foundations Server.

Just to clarify myself here: I don't mind getting these emails and giving a hand where I can - just one way of paying my dues to the Lotus community.
.

Installing VMWare on Lotus Foundations

I've had a question about loading the Vistualization module in LFS and I decided to make it into a separate post of its own. There are three downloadable components required to run VMWare. The LFS update to version 1.1 and the Run package are both downloadable from where-ever you obtained your original LFS software but the VMWare module is only available through IBM/Lotus Business Partners.

You also need to create a free account on www.vmware.com and request Linux licence keys. VMWare will send you an email with a validated login and once you follow the link in the email to get your licence keys you will have the licence keys to paste into the appropriate dialog box when you run the VMWare install. When all of that is done, if you select the 'Add-ons' option from the left hand menu you should see the following entry in your list under the 'Status' tab.

Status = (Tick)
Team = lf-virtualization
Add-on Container = Lotus Foundations Run 1.1
Enabled = Yes

At that point the VMWare module is installed and ready to go. Click on the 'Virtualization' tab adjacent to the 'Status' tab and then click on the button at the bottom of the page labeled 'Advanced Virtualization Settings'. This will open a new LFS interface communicating via Port 8333 and you can begin to create Virtual Machines.


The only problem I had was the ever-persistant Firefox glitch that sees any new web interface with LFS as a security exception.
.

Exposing Domino Web apps under Foundations

You can publicly expose a LFS-hosted Notes database on the web via port 4443 eg https://www.xyz.com.au:4443/mynotesdatabase.nsf but the documentation is silent about what Notes web features will/ won't work in that environment. Note that you need secure HTTP (probably because that is the webmail port) which raises the question of how you authenticate visitors BEFORE they get to your application.

The Nitix Knowledgebase lists ports 1352, 2222, 4443 and 8585 as being available through the Nitix Blue/Lotus Foundations Start server firewall but I've only been successful with web access through 4443. I would guess that 1352 is limited to NNTP but I'm curious about the possibilities of 2222 and 8585.

Anyone used those ports before?
.

Foundations can be so boring at times...

I was hoping to get a really meaty post out of my upgrading my server to Foundations 1.1 and Domino 8.5 (plus installing VMWare) but it all went according to the manual. Less than an hours work of copying files and rebooting the server when instructed.

Boring.
.

The score so far: Humans 1 - Foundations auto-config 0

A customer based in a serviced office has an installation with the eth0 port connected to his internal network and the eth1 port plugged into a communal switch which eventually leads the connection out into the internet. LFS allows manual IP configuration of eth0 (lets call it 192.168.0.1) but insisted on doing its own "search and configure" for the internet connection. When we first set it up it found the right address (lets call it 111.111.111.111) and everything was fine and dandy.

Then the serviced office provider decided to install a new firewall and his customers had to endure some connection downtime while that happened. When all of the systems were reconnected my customer was perplexed to find that his rebooted LFS server was now showing the firewall's external IP (lets call it 222.222.222.222) as its own eth1 IP address.

We did toy with the idea of adding new DNS entries to LFS to try to work around the problem but I dislike those type of bandaid solutions - they tend to come back and bite you further down the track when you're solving some other unrelated configuration problem.

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth and consumption of coffee we found an answer by connecting the LFS eth1 to a reprogrammed router which that been isolated from the rest of the network. The router range was limited to a single address (111.111.111.111) and when we ran the LFS netscan command the LFS eth1 picked up the magic number and permanently stored it into its configuration file. We then pulled the eth1 cable out of the router and plugged it into the regular network switch and everyone was happy. We still haven't figured out why LFS was picking up the Firewall external IP and that question might stay in the too-hard basket for some years to come. I think a review of the Firewall configuration might reveal some interesting anomolies, but we aren't allowed to examine that hardware.

Every day is a new adventure.
.

How far can you go with Lotus Foundations Branch Office?

I've been looking at Lotus Foundations Branch Office (LFBO) recently. First up, full marks for the Foundations Team for upgrading the documentation to a standard worthy of IBM. Well done guys. Second, let's see how far LFBO goes as a Domino server. Here's an except from the LFBO Administration guide.


Lotus Foundations Branch Office contains a Lotus Domino server that may be used like any other Lotus Domino server, but there are some Lotus Foundations Branch Office licensing differences:

• It must be used as a ″spoke″ within an existing Lotus Domino Enterprise server ″hub and spoke″ infrastructure
• It must connect into a hub that is a Lotus Domino Enterprise server or IBM Lotus Domino Messaging Server
• It can be used with up to 500 users
• The Lotus Foundations Branch Office server cannot be clustered
• It does not include bundled packages normally included in other Lotus Domino® packages, such as IBM® WebSphere® Application Server, IBM WebSphere Portal Server, IBM Tivoli® Directory Integrator or IBM DB2® Enterprise Edition packages

I can live without clustering and the Websphere/Tivoli/DB2 bundle but the gotcha is in the hub and spoke rule. A Foundations server can't be a hub so you can't create a hub and spoke topography consisting of just two Foundations servers. To be fair to IBM, they are selling this unit as a Branch Office solution so you're getting exactly what you paid for.

Where I'm unclear at the moment is how LFBO works in an organisation with (say) 900 users equally divided between three sites with the primary site as a Domino Enterprise server talking to a couple of remote LFBO servers on the spokes. It might need some technical juggling to reconcile the Foundations security model with the existing Domino Enterprise server address book, especially if you are migrating two thirds of your existing Domino ids into Foundations ids.

One things for sure... this model will take more than 30 minutes per server to set up and bed down.
.

Foundations: No Port in a Storm?

The TCP/IP architecture which underpins modern networking can handle up to 65535 ports per IP address and port allocation is co-ordinated by the IANA (Internet Assigned Number Authority) registry.

The Webadmin console for Lotus Foundations Server uses port 8042 and 8043. These ports fall into the range of ports 1024 through 49151 which is IANA’s category of “DCCP Registered ports” and according to IANA those ports SHOULD NOT be used without IANA registration (their emphasis).

Two days ago (16th November 2008) the IANA registry was updated and now shows port 8042 allocated to “FireScope Agent” and port 8043 allocated to ‘FireScope Server’. Firescope has been around for two years and make software products which “…provides a real-time view of the health of IT operations by collecting and processing security, performance and availability data from nearly any server, router, security point solution or other networked device.”

So where does that leave Lotus Foundations Server? Apart from the bleedingly obvious fact that you can’t run Firescope on Foundations, I think Firescope has the Legal High Ground here and IBM/Lotus will eventually need to change the port address for Foundations.

In the end, its no big deal if Lotus has to do that, but after having the product in the market for ten years I do find it amazing that another company has beaten Nitix/IBM/Lotus to the punch and registered those ports for its own use.
.