... life comes along and messes them up again. Last Thursday night started normally enough with getting number one son to bed and then playing an hour of whodunnit murder mystery on the computer with my lovely wife. We still don't know whodunnit but we're getting closer.
Belinda went to bed about ten but got up half an hour later with severe abdominal pains and [lots of needless details omitted]. Neither of us have family in the immediate neighborhood so we drafted a nearby friend to watch over our sleeping son while I broke a number of speed limits getting Belinda to the nearest hospital. Four days and an emergency operation later we have hopes of Belinda getting out of hospital tomorrow and then we can pick up our lives where we left off late last week.
The only benefit I can see out of all of this was it bought home to me quite sharply where my priorities lie. Lotus software has been my career since 1987 but it will never be the most important thing in my life. Yeah, that guy standing outside the San Hospital Emergency ward crying his eyes out was me. Thanks to Nurse Annie Howard in San Emergency who watched over Belinda like a hovering angel.
I've got a meeting with IBM tomorrow at 10am and I hope they forgive me if I'm a little distracted.
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Sunday, April 5, 2009
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.
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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.
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Application Design: "In the long run, we're all dead"
A recent post over at edbrill.com got me thinking about design philosophy. 'Jason' was talking about his role in migrating existing Notes apps onto the MS framework and declared...
" ... most Notes apps start out poorly designed, have tons of little bells and whistles added over time and as it becomes unscalable developers bandaid the whole thing together with scheduled agents and buttons and all sorts of nonsense. It's hard to just migrate that mound of crap overnight. If a company does it right, they'll spend the time they should have spent originally with the Notes app project and put together a sound design and data model...."
Now there's all kinds of emotive language tied up in his post but lets skip over that for the moment. Of the millions of Notes applications in use today there will be a high percentage which either were built decades ago using Notes R1 / R2 / R3 / R4 or R5 development tools and reflect the technical limits of those tools, or were built to serve a particular need and were so successful in that role that they 'grew like topsy' to fulfil other roles.
Jason's beef seems to be that those Domino applications don't map to his definition of a "sound design and data model". I'd say Jason is falling into the trap of taking a subjective set of criteria (in this case, the capability of the MS toolset) and using it to judge the business value of the existing application. It's a classic IT beartrap - seeking to define the success of a business application using non-business criteria.
When designing applications it's certainly important to pay attention to accuracy of data modelling but its also important to ensure that the application is affordable and available. Unless a business is already far advanced with their implementation of a Business Maturity Model then it's highly likely that their data models and workflows will not fit neatly into Jason's definition of a sound design and data model. Sure, you can take a long term approach and stall the database development until the business gets all of its Ducks in a Row, but in the long run, we're all dead. Incomplete design models and ever-changing business specifications are a fact of life. The Power of Notes is that it has always been capable of helping a business 'where the Rubber meets the Road' and providing good IT applications for the Here and Now. Perhaps Jason should just upgrade his toolset to Domino Designer 8.5 and see if his problems are still insurmountable.
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" ... most Notes apps start out poorly designed, have tons of little bells and whistles added over time and as it becomes unscalable developers bandaid the whole thing together with scheduled agents and buttons and all sorts of nonsense. It's hard to just migrate that mound of crap overnight. If a company does it right, they'll spend the time they should have spent originally with the Notes app project and put together a sound design and data model...."
Now there's all kinds of emotive language tied up in his post but lets skip over that for the moment. Of the millions of Notes applications in use today there will be a high percentage which either were built decades ago using Notes R1 / R2 / R3 / R4 or R5 development tools and reflect the technical limits of those tools, or were built to serve a particular need and were so successful in that role that they 'grew like topsy' to fulfil other roles.
Jason's beef seems to be that those Domino applications don't map to his definition of a "sound design and data model". I'd say Jason is falling into the trap of taking a subjective set of criteria (in this case, the capability of the MS toolset) and using it to judge the business value of the existing application. It's a classic IT beartrap - seeking to define the success of a business application using non-business criteria.
When designing applications it's certainly important to pay attention to accuracy of data modelling but its also important to ensure that the application is affordable and available. Unless a business is already far advanced with their implementation of a Business Maturity Model then it's highly likely that their data models and workflows will not fit neatly into Jason's definition of a sound design and data model. Sure, you can take a long term approach and stall the database development until the business gets all of its Ducks in a Row, but in the long run, we're all dead. Incomplete design models and ever-changing business specifications are a fact of life. The Power of Notes is that it has always been capable of helping a business 'where the Rubber meets the Road' and providing good IT applications for the Here and Now. Perhaps Jason should just upgrade his toolset to Domino Designer 8.5 and see if his problems are still insurmountable.
.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
OT: Dammit Jim I'm a Marketing Man... not an English Teacher!
I watched the trailer for the new Star Trek movie last night and I was struck by the typo in the description of the clip. Remember that this isn't a pirate clip uploaded to YouTube by some geek from GalaxyQuest... this is an official publicity release in a major metropolitan newspaper.
Star Trek: Trailer 2 (02:04)
J.J. Abrams' second Star Trek trailer gives a peak at what we can expect.
I was going to send an email to the editor but I realized that they hadn't responded to my last four emails pointing out typos on their web site.
I must be getting old.
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Star Trek: Trailer 2 (02:04)
J.J. Abrams' second Star Trek trailer gives a peak at what we can expect.
I was going to send an email to the editor but I realized that they hadn't responded to my last four emails pointing out typos on their web site.
I must be getting old.
.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
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?
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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?
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Wednesday, April 1, 2009
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.
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Boring.
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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.
.
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.
.
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