Symetrik Domino Consulting

Posts Tagged ‘Deployment’

I’ve been running a CentOS 4 box (which was eventually upgraded to 5.0) for quite a few years now. I wouldn’t say that I’m a total command line *nix guru, but I’ve enjoyed managing the server and learning a few things over the years other than Windows NT/2000/2003/2008.

I’m about to move some web servers from a dedicated CentOS LAMP box at a traditional hosting environment to Amazon Web Services.

There is quite alot to consider and there seems to be more architecture planning involved in running a system there at Amazon’s service and a little bit different way of doing things than the traditional web hosting environment, but it also opens up a great potential to testing out dev servers or rolling dev servers into productions servers, etc. etc. not to mention the scalability and redundancy offered.

While doing research, I keep seeing more and more and more about Ubuntu, which sparked me to do a little research and see what all the hubabub was all about.

I’m now considering running Linux Ubuntu 10.04 Lynx server as my server instead of CentOS.

Does anyone out there in the Lotus blogosphere have any experience with moving from Fedora/CentOS to Debian/Ubuntu flavors? If so, I’d love to have a casual chat. More importantly, is anyone using Amazon Web Services? It seems like quite a considerably more complex operation than throwing a few physical boxes in a rack and being done with them.

Like most of you, I glean my information from various sources: Blogs, IBM Notes/Domino FAQ Newsletter, Notes Discussion forums at IBM, IBM technote searches, custom Notes/Domino google searches, Stumbleupon, delicious.com, and various other newsletters such as the searchdomino.techtarget.com or LotusUserGroup, etc.

I just recently signed up for LinkedIn and joined a few Notes/Domino groups. I haven’t done much with it yet, but here’s my public profile http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidkillingsworth.

Today, I received a LinkedIn post with an answer which pointed to Technote 1196837 – Using a Desktop Policy to set notes.ini and Location parameters.

I really wish I had seen this technote a very long time ago.

I just want to mention that I love HP (and previously Compaq) servers. I love installing Windows 2003 with a Smart Start DVD and all of the HP Insight Management agents, the Windows drivers for the various systems components being installed when it’s all said and done.

I’ve been playing with the HP Systems Insight Management Console for the last few months. It’s a great tool and lots and lots of granular monitoring, patch and firmware deployment, etc.

I just realized this week that you could go to HP’s website and install what’s called a Proliant Support Pack.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m sure that most admins have been using text files to generate IDs for a long time.

I haven’t.

I sat down to register 284 users this week. It was a new process to me, so I’m going to go through the list of steps here.
Read the rest of this entry »

For a very long time, the “Optional Network Drivers” that Lotus forces you to install has been a very big thorn in my side.

Who uses anything besides TCPIP anymore?

I always disable any non TCPIP ports after install as it complicates Notes configuration for desktop support people, complicates location document creation, and I had one user once who had all the default ports enabled. He also had some network drives permanently mapped. When he was at a site that could not see the network mapped drives, and he would save an attachment, Notes would freeze.

After some study, I realized that Notes was trying to build the list of places to store the attachment for explorer and searching every possible port to map those drives.

I disabled everything except TCPIP for the guy and tried the same process. The guy thought I was Santa Claus and that he’d just received the best Christmas gift ever. The attachment save dialog window instantly opened and presented a local directory.

I’ve tried several ways to get around this on install (and there is no way to disable the ports by policies).
Read the rest of this entry »