Eric Mack On-Line

Before I recommend a new technology to a client, I like to try it in-house. My goal is to learn the ins and outs of new technology and software so that I can recommend the best configuration to a client. This means a lot of learning and experimentation. Often, everything comes together, just as I planned. Sometimes, the pieces just don't quite work well together. This weekend was one of those times.


The digital sandbox, this weekend.

I spent much of the weekend with a long-time colleague, Russ Chung, configuring a high-performance server for a productivity development project I'm working on.

Unfortunately, IBM Domino 7 and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 would not play well together this weekend. We were unable to come up with a stable system after exiting the Domino server and we were unable to determine the cause. Processes continued to run, causing the subsequent restart to fail. The only solution - an unacceptable one - was to reboot the server after each Domino server shutdown. I'm disappointed that we could not make this combination perform reliably in the lab. It's a shame, too. I was really hoping to put this system into production. I'm not giving up; I'll revisit this again.

After several attempts to reload/reconfigure, I decided that this combination was not one I could put my name on - at least not this weekend. I decided to deploy Domino 6.54 instead. From then on, the loading process progressed well and without incident.

It was not exactly the way I planned to spend my weekend, but I'm thankful that we could learn this lesson here, in the lab, rather than in production.

I know my clients will be thankful, too.

I hope you have a great week.

PS. The RSS feed for this blog continues to have problems. I'm hoping for a fix, soon. Thank you for your patience.