Symetrik Domino Consulting

Yesterday was a rough day being a Domino mail server admin.

First, let me explain our environment. Most of our company is on Domino and Notes 6.5.1.-6 (mostly Notes 6.5.4).

There is one division that refuses to move to Notes because they love outlook, and their main excuse is that there is the 100 mail rule limitation of Notes. They actually use email as a system like I’ve never seen. They manage a fleet of ships, and each ships sends different kinds of messages, these messages are sent to groups that are nested several times, so many many people receive them. Some people need them for one reason or another. These messages also go into a linux application server and are search able via a web interface.

So basically, they cannot live without having sometimes 200 mail rules. They are pushing electronic mail to the boundaries. I’m sure there is a better way for them to do all of this, but who has the time to pitch a better idea to them, especially when they have no budget. Read the rest of this entry »

We made the decision to roll back half of our hosted Domino severs from our newly outsourced hosted servers at our outsource facility.

Most of our servers are clustered, and we use clustering for fail over, not load balancing, so our odd number servers are primary, and even number servers are the failover cluster mates.

Since at our hosted facility, the production environment was down, and the disaster recovery site wasn’t being backed up, we wanted to fall back the even number servers to our original facility in-house. This way, at least we would have a backup, or fall back plan, if our servers went down again at the outsource facility.

First, we removed the machines from the cluster in the NAB. Read the rest of this entry »

Today just as I got into the office and started my daily grind, I noticed that my mail server had hung (ok, well not after I checked to see if 8.01 was out yet…as far as I know it will only be a few more hours).

So, then I stood up and told my co-workers who were starting to notice the same thing.

I then noticed it wasn’t just one server, it was all of our servers. Everyone started rushing around, and trying to figure out what to do.

You see we have just outsourced all of our servers to an externalized hosting facility two weeks ago. Last week, we had a similar outage from 12AM to 7:15AM, no patrol monitoring alerts, nothing. We had to rely on users in Brazil and America to let us know about the outage 4 hours after it was in effect. Our Inbound/Outbound Internet gateways, our central servers that act as relays for all internal mail (by design) and our POP3, Passthru, and Domino servers that serve all users who sit in sites that are not big enough to have their own server.

Quite alot of stuff to be going down for worldwide operations.

Today, it turns out that the SAN went down, so all servers that were connected to the SAN at the hosting facility were down. Read the rest of this entry »

The first post on the Notes 8.5 Beta discussion forum was made on January 18th. (I didn’t know that there was one). I got a notification from a user this morning that it was available.

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/notesmacforum.nsf/5049ee164c54799785256bff00519260/720a4d3de548bbaa852573d40062a199?OpenDocument”>Notes 8.5 Beta Program announcement

This beta version corresponds with the windows 8.01 release.

I knew this would be coming out this week as Lotusphere started yesterday (Sunday).

A couple of things to note. This is a beta version. It works only on OS X 10.5 (not 10.4) and the standard version only works on the Intel, not powerPC version.

Today while setting up a replication connection between some busy hubs that provide webmail access, route outbound SMTP traffic, and replicate databases, plus are named as the home server for some databases – both clustered
…to a new remote server cluster in America that serves as a mail server, and soon to be webmail server.

I was trying to increase the efficiency of the replication between the busy hubs, the slow network connection, and the remote mail server, so that mailbox replication would be as fast as possible.

The current webmail server is located on the hubs for these remote mail servers (a trick through DNS and the webmail redirect).