Andy Yiu’s Blog

I recently read an article assigned by MBA professor outlining how an organization in the Northeast was brought to its knees due to an experimental P2P program running on the network.  In that specific circumstance the program was designed to move streamline the data transfer from one node to another node.  Originally the program started out moving small bits of data and over time routers became overloaded as terabytes of data were transferred.  This article highlighted the importance of test environments.

Over the last few weeks I have had the opportunity to talk with different people and ask them if the customers they have worked with have up-to-date testing environments.  After polling various people it appears that a majority of companies do not have test environments which realistically mimic their production environment.  I would like to stress the value a testing environment.  By taking the time to build out and maintain a test environment that mimics the production environment, system administrators can save themselves a lot of time and headaches. All changes can be tested before implemeting the change in the production environment. With server virtualization packages, test environments do not have to be running all the time and hence physical machines can be multipurposed to serve as testing platforms for other applications.  So… with this I urge all companies to consider implemeting test environments.

If you love using Firefox, make sure you download Firefox 3.0 today. Mozilla is trying to set a world record so make sure you make your mark. The site is really really slow right now but you have until June 18th 10:00am PST to contribute to the world record attempt.

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/

http://www.getfirefox.com/

As most of you have seen, the Notes Domino 8.5 Public Beta went public a few weeks ago.  I recently installed the client and I can tell that there have been major performance improvements in the handling of the various functions.  First of all, the team has changed the startup so that it appears to start quicker.  Overall the stability of the client is much improved.  Actions such as opening my mail file seem to occur much quicker so I’m sure that some performance tweaks were put in there.

If you haven’t downloaded and installed the Notes 8.5 Public Beta 1, I would strongly recommend trying it out.  I am so confident with this client now that I am using as my primary client and I have completely removed my Notes 8.0.1 installation.

Here’s the link to the download site:

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd85forum.nsf/DateAllThreadedWeb/a6a60b2adfabe227852574490072d7a5?OpenDocument

If you haven’t taken a look at the Sametime Gateway Wiki recently, make sure you take a look at it.  It has been updated with some great information about sizing the Sametime Gateway server.  This week I’m up in Westford visiting the development and service teams.  I’ll be sure to post any valuable lessons learned from our discussions.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/sametime/Home

Everyone has probably seen by now that there was a pretty severe earthquake in the Sichuan Province of China.  Thank you to everyone who has sent me emails and pinged me.  My relatives and family in Chengdu are fine and were not severely affected by the event.  The Chinese government has been very quick to react to the event and I am amazed by how courteous people are when it comes down to the basics.  Unlike the response with Hurricane Rita in the US, people are not raiding electronic stores or stealing.  In Beijing, many buildings were evacuated and the government sent text messages to everyone to inform them of what happened.

In case any of you are wondering, I did not really feel the effects of (or at least didn’t notice) the earthquake here in Shenzhen but there were reports that it was felt in Hong Kong.  At this time,  many humanitarian agencies are encouraging financial aid opposed to physical aid due to the condition of roads and the transport system.  Donations can be made at the China Red Cross site.

There is another blog at the Shanghaiist which is providing more real-time updates of the situation.

In China, there is one week called the Golden Week. This is the one week during the year where everyone flocks home to be with their families and to go on vacation. The weather during this week is supposed to be some of the best weather during the entire year. Right now, I am in Shenzhen, China with one of the Sametime developers for a customer visit. Unfortunately the weather this year is quite hazy, but the temperature is mild. I would propose that US companies also have a “Golden Week”, but I assume that would take out of our floating holiday…..just a thought.

Today also marks the day when the Olympic Torch relay occurs in Hong Kong. The Chinese Government has taken great strides to ensure that even the most prestine detail is attended to during the relay. Tsim Sha Tsui along Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor has literally been closed off and redecorated with Beijing 2008 Olympic promotional materials. While we would love to see the Olympic Relay in Hong Kong, we all know that its gonna be jam packed and will probably take a couple hours to leave any one area after the torch passes. In the interm, we have decided to pass up watching the relay and instead will do the tourist thing in Shenzhen.

This might be a little bit of old news, but last Friday IBM released Sametime 8.0.1.  This released contains multiple bug fixes but also a few new features.  Here are some of the new features which have been added.

Limited Citrix support

Sametime Web Conferencing
- New higher quality audio codec in meetings
- Participant list includes Recent Speakers view in meetings with computer-based audio
- Push to Talk
- Multiple Monitor Support in Screen Sharing
- Remove users from meeting
Integration with AdminP for automatic name changes
Office/Outlook enhancements
Kiosk mode
Sametime Connect Web API Toolkit
Sametime Gateway
- SIP NAT support for Sametime Gateway
- Update to AOL certificates
- Creating an exclusion list
- Yahoo! updates VIPs and hosts

If you are deploying Sametime 8.0 using a software distribution suite such as Microsoft SMS, you need to take a look at IBM Technote 1302764 and the attached hotfix.

This hotfix corrects a defect that prevents it from being executed by a non-administrative account, using the Windows Run As functionality to give Administrator rights. It also resolves the problem of running the installer using the methods listed above as the System account.

In 7.5.1 and above, a new feature was added to manage the size of the various meeting diagnostics files.  This registry setting can be used to split C++ diagnostics into module specific files, and they will respect the size limit specified.

MaxLogSizeMb=dword:00000400
ModuleLogEnabled=dword:00000001
Enabled in [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Lotus\Sametime\MeetingServer\Diagnostics]

The example above enables the splitting of the modules, and will limit them to 1024mb each as defined by the MaxLogSizeMb parameter.  When the 1024mb limit is reached, the current file is renamed/backed up, and a new one created. The server will then keep the current and the immediate prior file.  Files older than that will be removed.

The summary.diag file can also be disabled altogether by setting the “SummaryLogEnabled” to 0. However this is not recommended as it does help with troubleshooting issues.