SnTT - Reminders for those Upgrading from R5

Yes, I said R5, 5.0.9a to be exact.

I have been quiet for a few days as I have been off site reminding myself why I hate Windows 2008 and why I loved R5.

Windows 2008 seems to not be configured for SMBs out of the box. No surprise there.
But when it is a stand alone server so to speak in an SMB(should have gone Foundations in this case, but that's a whole other post for some other time) well it just takes a little longer to make it useful, say compared to Win 2003 or even 2000. This is now the 2nd server like this in 2 weeks, so if someone has some better advice I will pass it along to the server builders.

First if you want the new server to see the old server, or anything else, you have to enable some Services like UpnP and Computer Browser. And Netbios will help too.
Make sure network discovery is enabled on the windows 2008 machine too so others can find it, like this poor old Windows 2000 R5 server.

Now that R5 server in this case was setup with some odd settings. For instance, a made up FQHN (Fully Qualified Host name). Because they weren't using it for web mail or web apps(they do use it for email and apps just not web).
So when you go to build your new server(in place upgrade was not likely given the new hardware and other reasons) you probably think you can just enter the old server name and get the NAB? In this case you would be wrong.

You see IBM decided that these days everyone uses a web server or some other reason for a FQHN and now will not talk to the older server, no matter what IP, name or anything you try IF the FQHN is not valid. What is worse is if you try to tell the new server to get the copy of the NAB you have in a file or on a cd...it still demands a server name and FQHN to work!

OK, even knowing that(it's in the info centers of R8 admin)it would never occur to me, or you probably, that the name in the field in the server doc was....invalid! Dead, not used, not even in the domain! So I started thinking way back to R5 time and how we used to build servers. Which to be fair isn't much different today, but in this case saved me some time.

The Domino server name did not match the computer name which in turn did not match anything else. The Port name is what helped. Copied the port name to the FQHN field and restarted the server and poof, all completed.

No more 20% complete and server not responding error.

Between these 2 things I spent the better part of the afternoon. Oh and then their firewall which is out of date and support and maintenance would not let me see the server from the web to test traveler or webmail. I tested them using Wifi and my phone but we took more time to figure out the firewall. Remember this, if you find a R5 server in the wilderness, you will also find the equivalent firewall, pcs, routers and switches from 5-10 years ago. So load up on memory, ancient memory, and just go do it but think before you leap as the old configuration really worked well and you have to reconfigure it for the modern era.

There is also a long discussion going on about how they use Domino for outgoing emails only and they use an outside ISP for incoming and use Notes as their email. We are moving it all back to Domino but I never cease to be amazed at the configurations I find.

DAOS will be a big bonus for them in time as will the new switch they have to get after we found the one we were using was only doing 33kb/sec. No wonder they thought the mail server was slow. Now it moves at 10-15MB/sec while we reconfigure the hardware. Sometimes it's really NOT Domino's fault.

And yes, the iPhone CEO is really happy with traveler.

Failure was the only option

We interrupt the normal evangelising to provide a brief and lighthearted view of what can go wrong when presenting to your peers at an annual conference.

Way back when, I was turning 30 and Lotus threw me a huge party in Athens with all my friends and fellow Lotii. Actually it was the annual Tech conferene where everyone learns what's new and how to things on their laptop.

My team had been going trhough some rough patches and the last thing we needed was this event. But we got it together worked out the plans and executed.
Except my laptop was not having it. Beta code of R5 and some other issues created an unstable environmentthat just could not hold on long enough.

Sure enough 5 minutes in to my explanations around why Directory Catalogs are/were the greatest news I lost it all. Dead in the water. So what else could I do, I tried to walk everyone through setting it up on their laptops using my memory and notes I left myself on a sheet of paper.

Got horrible reviews, worst ever, but in the end had a number of people thank me for the explanations and help with setting it up and hitting the key reasons why it was important to get companies to use it. So all was not lost.

One again I learned you can not present on something you don't know well(luckily I did) because you never know what will happen on stage. You can give an opinion and some help but never ever present to staff or clients what you don't know because if you los eyour notes or laptop or slides what are you going to do?

Unique Replication Roadblock

While upgrading a server(R5)and migrating the users to the new (R7) Lotus Domino server we have run into a situation which I have been tangling with for years.

In this case it is not a upgrade overnight solution it is phased in over a month or 2 for 500+ users due to client controlos and change management procedures.

Have I mentioned how much I hate change management procedures?! Another prcoess created because of Microsoft failures in applications. (I had to fit this in, I recognize the need for these procedures, really I do!)

So when we replicate the user's mail file from R5 to R7 the template and changes get written over and revert back to R5 instead of the R7 ones.

We know we can set the ACL to Editor on the server name and that will stop design changes from replicating, but then it also prevents some tasks and agents from running on the mail file which is also not a good idea in this case.

We can go ionto advanced settings on replication and select or deselect replicate designs, forms etc. but we do not want to do it on a per user basis either.

Thought we could try an agent to run against the users selected and uncheck the design elements but our findings, and Lotus support(Thanks Clint and Paul for trying) agreed, there is no way to do this in an exposed method or via API manner.

Sounds like a job for Ideajam.net

We need policies for advanced replication settings or a programmatic way to adress them.

So far so Good

Not finished but the 1st competitive crisis of my new partner went well.
Money is always the issue, right?
Licenses would cost $20K to upgrade to R7/8 but MS wants to give them way for $1,000.
Great deal, save big money for the non-profit, right? Wrong!

Licenses, in the Lotus case is all it requires, yes some admin time, but since they have the staff it is not an issue.
Hardware, in the Microosft case is seriously required. 64-bit servers are not cheap, $8,000 for the one I looked up to configure andthat was without support contracts!
So if thy wanted an Exchange 2007 server they have to buy 2 servers of the exact same specifications, one for production, one for backup/drp. Cost so far $17,000.
But wait, they also need to update their AD infrastructure to 2007. More software licenses.
Plus they would want OWA which would mean more servers too!
Not going to continue this you get the idea...