Kevin Kanarski

Interesting error dialog of the day

2009-04-23T08:27:00.005-05:00

Saw this dialog on one of our BES Domino servers yesterday....

I suspect this dialog was from BES since Domino doesn't normally throw up Windows dialogs. The Domino console was in the background with a PANIC message.

Production mail servers running Domino 8.5

2009-03-25T08:14:00.006-05:00

All of our production mail servers are now running Domino 8.5. We ran into some minor issues with database corruption but it seems that newer versions of Domino always pick up corruption that the previous version didn't. We also have very large mail files that have been touched heavily by enterprise archiving lately so I'm sure this exposed some issues. Sometimes the server would catch it and automatically do a consistency check but some we had to manually run a fixup.

We also ran into the SPR# TLAM7NGJXY memory leak issue on some servers as stated in a previous post. We now have HF55 (Windows) / L502113 (i5/OS) running on all mail servers and haven't seen the issue since. We have IF1 running on our administration server for the group update issue. We haven't seen the memory leak issue on that server so no need for a special hot fix on that one.

Next is to upgrade to the 8.5 ODS and enable design and data compression. This will probably happen over Memorial Day weekend when I have a long weekend to run compacts. I'll most likely do our backup cluster servers before then and do the primary servers over the long weekend.

We are holding off on DAOS for now. I expect we will do something with it in the second half of the year.

Domino 8.5 rollout has begun

2009-03-12T08:02:00.006-05:00

We started deploying Domino 8.5 to our production mail servers. The upgrade itself has been easy as with previous releases. We run most of our mail servers on IBM i platform so it's a single command to update a Domino partition to 8.5 code. I also run a post upgrade script outlined below. I haven't done any INI tweeking or ODS upgrades yet just laying down the code.

We have 10 production mail servers running 8.5 so far and so far so good except for 2 of them. One is related to a know memory leak, SPR# TLAM7NGJXY, which there is a fix for. We have the fix but haven't deployed it yet. This issue only happened once on one server so far.

The other we saw just this week. The server in question had been upgraded for a week and a half with no issues and then all of the sudden most of the mail files were marked as corrupt. The corruption started right after the UpdAll task started one morning at 2 am. The predominant corruption was Bitmap checksum incorrect. A simple fixup fixed the database and we ran it against a database as the server alerts came in. If I would have know the large number of databases impacted I would have just ran fixup against all mail files on the server when it initially started. We currently have a PMR open on this and IBM is investigating.

One thing I noticed in the PMR updates is there is a known issue with DAOS and Trend ScanMail. I don't know the specifics but a fix is in the works so just be advised if you use the two together. We use ScanMail but haven't turned DAOS on yet except on one proof of concept server. We haven't seen an issue on that server.

Here is the post upgrade script I use on our IBM i Domino servers. This is an IBM i QSH shell script but is easily adpated to Windows. Note I delete the pernames.ntf. This is because we have personal address books replicated to the servers and I don't want them getting the 8.5 design just yet.

domdir='put server data directory here'
domserver='put server name here'

echo "Make sure the Domino server has ENDED before continuing."
echo "Enter 1 to continue or any other key to exit."
read proceed
if test "${proceed}" != "1"; then
echo "Exiting.";
exit
fi

cd $domdir
echo "Making backup of files..."
mv $domdir/log.nsf $domdir/backup/log.R85
mv $domdir/mail1.box $domdir/backup/mail1.R85
mv $domdir/mail2.box $domdir/backup/mail2.R85
rm $domdir/pernames.ntf

echo "Submitting batch commands..."
system -v "RUNDOMCMD SERVER($domserver) CMD(CALL PGM(QNOTES/FIXUP) PARM('names.nsf' '-f' '-j' '-v' '-l')) BATCH(*YES)"
system -v "RUNDOMCMD SERVER($domserver) CMD(CALL PGM(QNOTES/FIXUP) PARM('admin4.nsf' '-f' '-j' '-v' '-l')) BATCH(*YES)"
system -v "RUNDOMCMD SERVER($domserver) CMD(CALL PGM(QNOTES/COMPACT) PARM('names.nsf' '-c')) BATCH(*YES) ALWMLTTHD(*YES)"
system -v "RUNDOMCMD SERVER($domserver) CMD(CALL PGM(QNOTES/COMPACT) PARM('admin4.nsf' '-c')) BATCH(*YES) ALWMLTTHD(*YES)"
system -v "RUNDOMCMD SERVER($domserver) CMD(CALL PGM(QNOTES/UPDALL) PARM('names.nsf' '-RX')) BATCH(*YES)"
system -v "RUNDOMCMD SERVER($domserver) CMD(CALL PGM(QNOTES/UPDALL) PARM('admin4.nsf' '-RX')) BATCH(*YES)"
echo "Jobs have been submitted to the QBATCH job queue. Monitor the queue for job completion before starting the server."

Flight Log: March flight to the farm

2009-03-01T19:43:00.001-06:00

I have been wanting to fly over my grandparents farm for some time now. I had a plane reserved for today and it looked like the winter weather would actually cooperate. If you call 20 degrees and North winds gusting to 23 knots cooperating. I debated about the winds but they were right down the runway and I needed some more high wind practice.

I originally had the 172SP reserved for today but it ended up going offline for maintenance. The other 172 was available, an R model, so I reserved it. This is the first time I have flown our club’s 172R. I normally fly the SP but I have flown an R model at other places. The R model has 20 fewer horsepower but in this cold weather it isn’t that noticeable.

I planned on flying over my grandparent’s farm West of Pontiac and then go over to Kankakee airport. Well there was lake effect snow coming down along the Illinois - Indiana border making KIKK MVFR. I flew to KVYS instead after the farm. They have a nice long wide runway into the wind to practice some gusty landings. The winds were anywhere from 10 to 40 degrees gusting to 21 knots. It was a little rocky on the approach but I stuck the landings. Landing back at LL10 with its 30 ft wide runway was interesting.

My daughter went with for the ride and took some pictures. She has been learning about weather in school so she was taking pictures of the clouds. Here are some other pictures she took.

Program Conversion for Domino 8.5 on IBM i V5R4

2009-02-23T20:26:00.004-06:00

Be advised of the Program Conversion that will take place if you install Domino 8.5 on V5R4. This takes a long while to process. Info on this step is included in the checklist.

If you have multiple V5R4 systems to install it on you can install it on one, perform a SAVLICPGM of the 8.5 program and then restore it to the other systems. Since the first system did the conversion it wont be needed on the other ones.

The conversion doesn't happen if you are running V6R1.

Change in Compact task for Domino 8.5 on IBM i

2009-02-23T20:10:00.008-06:00

I happened to be searching for something related to Domino on IBM i today and ran across this in the ND85 Beta 1 Release Notes...

IBM i: RUNDOMCMD CALL PGM(COMPACT) must run in *BATCH
Starting with Domino 8.5, the COMPACT program is multi-threaded and must be run in *BATCH mode.
Specify BATCH(*YES) ALWMLTTHD(*YES) on the RUNDOMCMD.
Running the COMPACT program can be used to upgrade databases to a new ODS level. For example, the following procedure can be used to upgrade a Domino 8.5 server's databases to ODS level 50.
1. Update notes.ini to contain: Create_R85_Databases=1
2. Run the following command with the server *ENDED to convert all existing server NSFs to ODS 50:
RUNDOMCMD SERVER() CMD(CALL PGM(QDOMINO850/COMPACT) PARM('-C'))
BATCH(*YES) ALWMLTTHD(*YES)

Now I can't find this information in any of the current online documents so I'm not sure if it still holds true. We currently use the Compact task when doing monthly maintenance on our Domino servers and they all use BATCH(*NO). I guess I will be trying BATCH(*YES) next time.

Update: I found where this is documented online here. If you try to run the Compact program with BATCH(*NO) it will return an 'Cannot create thread' error.

New DAOSEST posted - issue on i5/OS

2009-01-27T10:27:00.006-06:00

Paul Mooney and Andy Pedisich have posted regarding the new DAOS Estimator tool (v1.1). This new version eliminates the MIME to CD conversion that was seen with the old tool and it also adds a save file for installing on System i. We had already called IBM about the install file for System i so I was glad to see they fixed it.

However, I just installed the tool on our System i and ran it against one of our test Domino servers. The Domino server immediately crashes. I tired it multiple times with different files and it crashes every time. This Domino server is running 7.0.3FP1 and i5/OS V5R4M0.

I tried the new version on Windows and Linux Domino servers and they worked fine.

Run the tool on a test i5/OS Domino server first just in case.

Update: As stated in the comments, you need to have Domino 8.x code installed on i5/OS in order for the tool to work. The Domino server can be running 7.x but the 8.x code must be available.

Reader Poll: Where do you put your Domino transaction log files on i5/OS?

2008-12-30T11:09:00.007-06:00

When running Domino on i5/OS and using transaction logging, do you put the transaction log files in a folder under the Domino data folder or in a separate folder on the IFS?

There is a bit of a debate going on between us and IBM on this. All of our i5/OS Domino servers have their transaction log files located in a separate subdirectory on the IFS. Such as /TRANSLOG/Server/ versus using /Domino/Server/Data/logdir. Domino doesn't care where they are as long as you point to them. It looks like BRMS does care where they are. If they aren't located under the Data folder then they don't get treated as Domino transaction log files.

We have been running with them outside the data directory ever since we have had the i5/OS systems with no issues. However we are now getting corrupt transaction log files when BRMS runs every since the power issue discussed in my previous post. I also can't find it documented anywhere that they must reside under the data directory on i5.

We use circular logging versus archive so BRMS doesn't need to touch the log files but it still does.

Thanks for the input.

Don't pull that plug

2008-12-29T14:16:00.003-06:00

It's never a good thing when any type of server suddenly looses power. I have been told it can be very bad when it happens to an i5/OS box. Up until recently we have been lucky. Our collocation has a bad track record of power outages which takes down one of our biggest i5/OS servers. In the past it has come back up with no issues but the most recent one caused some headaches.

On the 23rd the power went out again. When the Domino partitions came back up we started to see some corruption issues. Since these servers are members of a cluster we just recreated the replicas that were corrupt. Minor pain but no biggie. Then our system engineer started noticing issues with BRMS. Jobs were still showing as active that were not actually running. This started showing up on the Domino servers that were supposedly being backed up by BRMS with the phantom job. One Domino server in particular started crashing and having strange behavior. When I tried to do a manual shutdown and restart the server took a while to come down and then would not come back up.

IBM recommeded an IPL to clear out the phantom BRMS job so we ended all the Domino servers and IPL'd the system. This cleared the BRMS job but the one Domino server still would not start. It eneded up being 2 issues with this server.

1) The Directory= entry in the NOTES.INI was messed up. It had a bunch of symbol charachters after the = sign. We have seen this on occasion with Domino on iSeries. The solution is to put the directory path info back in.

2) The transaction log files were corrupt. The Domino server would stall at the point where it was trying to read the log files when starting. I renamed the current trans log folder and created a new empty one. When Domino restarted it created new log files and ran a consistency check against all dbs. Note: it actually took 2 restarts to get the log files built again. The first start ended with a panic telling you to restart the server again to finish the process. Thanks for the info.

This power outage wasn't as smooth as the previous ones but at least Domino was able to repair itself without a full restore. It also helps that these are clusted servers so any data that was in the corrupt trans log files will replicate back from the other server.

Now to find a new collocation provider. The funny thing is they were upgrading their UPS's when this latest outage happened.

Google - 451 4.5.0 SMTP protocol violation

2008-11-06T10:21:00.007-06:00

I had an interesting issue with one of our outbound SMTP servers yesterday. At around 9am one of our servers would get the following error when sending to any domain hosted by Google...

451 4.5.0 SMTP protocol violation, see RFC 2821 s30si809416qbs.8 (in reply to end of DATA command)

We use Postfix for handling outbound SMTP internet mail and have 3 identical servers. The other 2 servers could send to google.com mail servers without error but this one could not. I started analyzing the actual communication and saw the following on the server having the issue...

DATA
250 2.1.0 OK s30si809416qbs.8
250 2.1.5 OK s30si809416qbs.8
354 Go ahead s30si809416qbs.8
.
QUIT
451 4.5.0 SMTP protocol violation, see RFC 2821 s30si809416qbs.8

It was sending the dot (end of data charachter) and QUIT command without waiting for a response from the Google server. The other servers would wait for the OK after sending the end of data character before sending QUIT. After some reasearch I found out this is done when PIPELINING is enabled. It turns out that Google enabled this on some of their servers yesterday but it was broken. Today it is turned off and all our SMTP servers can successfully send to Google e-mail domains.

Here is what the response from an EHLO command looks like if pipelining is enabled by a receiving server.....

EHLO yourdomain.com
250-mx.google.com at your service
250-SIZE 35651584
250-8BITMIME
250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
250 PIPELINING

Pipelining will cause your SMTP server to send commands in a stream without waiting for a response.

New family member

2008-10-21T13:22:00.005-05:00

We welcomed a new family member into our home this past Saturday. This is Buddy our new dog. He is a 10 month old Beagle Labrador mix. He was rescued from a kill shelter and we suspect had suffered some abuse by a previous owner. The physical scars will heel and he doesn’t seem to have any emotional scars. He has found a family that will treat him as a family member should be treated.

He is still getting used to his new surroundings and is a very well mannered dog. The girls love him. They look forward to playing with him and walking him. I’m glad that I’m not the only male in the house anymore.

Fall color at the Morton Arboretum

2008-10-14T15:15:00.008-05:00

I have lived in the Chicago area most of my life and have only been to the Morton Arboretum in Lisle a couple times. I made it a goal this year to get over there this fall and practice some nature photography. I took the day off from work since it is my birthday and decided it would be a perfect day for it. The rain that was forecast for today was pushed off until tomorrow and the sun was out.

I grabbed my Nikon D50 and only my Nikkor 50mm 1.8D lens. I wanted to constrain myself to this lens since it is a sharp lens and I wanted to see what I could do with it. My wife and youngest daughter joined me on the trip. The arboretum has a great children garden area with plenty to keep them entertained. With the expectation of spending more time there we signed up for the family membership so now we can go anytime without paying the entry fee.

It was a fantastic day for exploring. The sun was out, it was 65 degrees and a cool breeze. The trees are showing their fall colors. We stayed on the East side. I hiked one of the loop trails and then all of us drove the entire East loop.

Here is a link to the photo set on Flickr.

Flight Log: Birthday Flight

2008-10-12T19:10:00.000-05:00

I took my daughter for a flight in the Cessna today. It’s her 8th birthday today and my 38th birthday on Tuesday. So this was a combined birthday flight. It was an unusually warm day for October in Chicago. It was 80+ degrees on the ground so nature’s air conditioning at 5500’ felt good. We flew to Whiteside County airport (KSQI) just because I haven’t been there before and it qualifies for cross country time. We saw the trees changing colors from above and the progression of clean energy in the way of many wind turbines. I made a picture perfect landing on the mains and held the nose wheel off as long as possible.

When we parked at Whiteside Co. airport I noticed cars speeding around the tarmac. It turns out there was an SCCA race going on. They had orange cones outlining a track and members were doing time trials with their everyday cars. There were Miatas, Mustangs, Nissan Zs, and others. There was a lot of tire shredding going on with the tight turns.

On the way back to our home airport we were just below the lightly scattered clouds. It was almost like you could reach out and touch them. It was another good flight and always nice to get some practice in. Hopefully I won’t get into a drought this winter.

Updated my mail template to 8.0.2

2008-09-23T10:12:00.007-05:00

I have been running the 8.0.x Notes client for a while now at work but have kept my mail file on our production 7.x template. I decided to go ahead and add some of our customizations to the R8 mail template and apply it to my production mail file. The only thing I added were the functions for CommonStore so I could still retrieve archived content. We also have integration with our DMS in the R7 template but since I don't use that integration I left it out of the 8 template.

Overall it is a big step up in UI appearance. People I have shown it too also like the new look. This was the main reason for me upgrading my mail file. I want to show people what the new mail template looks like with the new client.

I can see how the new UI will take a bit of getting used to especially when coming from the older templates. It has taken me some time to get used to the new look of just the Inbox. New mail is bold black versus the color red, read messages are now a shade of gray versus normal black, and the message selection is white on blue background versus the black outline. I'm not saying these are bad things, they just take time to adjust to and I think it will take our users time as well. I do like the Shift-click and Ctrl-click multiple message selection and haven't turned the check mark margins back on. I also like the simplified message headers both on screen and on printouts.

There are many more improvments to the UI but these are just some that have stood out for me in the few days I have been using it.

I did get stumped on a design issue when adding the CommonStore views to the outline. With all the new Web stuff I couldn't figure out how to get a horizontal rule to appear above the CommonStore dropdown (see below). I can't find where these lines are being applied. Anyone know?

Lesson learned in domain naming

2008-09-11T12:27:00.003-05:00

I setup a new Foreign SMTP Domain recently so e-mail could be sent to a host outside of the Domino domain. Whenever I sent a message to this domain the Domino server hosting the connection would try to place the message in SMTP.box. SMTP.box hasn't been used since R4 SMTP MTA days.

I also noticed Domino was stripping the local primary internet domain off of the address. For instance, if the Domino domain hosted the abc.com internet domain and the foreign SMTP domain was setup to be external.abc.com, any message sent to test@external.abc.com would end up being test@external in the router mailbox.

After verifying SMTP connectivity to the external host and debugging the router it finally hit me. When setting up the Foreign SMTP Domain document I used the following example:

Internet domain: external.abc.com
Domain name: EXTERNAL

Since I named the internal domain name the same as the external internet sub-domain, Domino stripped the abc.com off of the address and tried to put it in SMTP.box. Changing the internal domain name to something else resolved the issue.

Check Subscriptioins causes the Notes client to take focus

2008-08-27T09:31:00.005-05:00

This may be a known issue but I wasn't able to find it anywhere. We are in the process of upgrading our Notes client to 7.0.3 and people started reporting that Notes was popping to the foreground when they were working in MS Word or Excel. It turns out that Check Subscriptions was enabled with the upgrade and this was causing Notes to take focus. Once this option was disabled Notes no longer behaved this way.

Here is the scenario that caused Notes to take focus. Launch Notes, open the mail file then open a message with a Word document attached. Open the Word attachment and leave Word in the foreground. Wait exactly 6 minutes and Notes will appear in the foreground.

Funny thing is that this only happened with Word and Excel, not Notepad. If I opened a TXT attachment with Notepad Notes wouldn't take focus.

Check Subscriptions is controlled by the $HeadlineDisableHeadlines INI parameter. 1 equals disabled. Unfortunatley this settings isn't available via the current desktop policy document. Can you set $ INI parameters with a $Pref field in the policy document? Time to go into the lab.

Update: $Pref$HeadlineDisableHeadlines set to 1 in the Desktop policy document does work for disabling the Check Subscriptions via policy.

Aviation weekend

2008-08-04T11:16:00.000-05:00

This past weekend was filled with aviation related events. I had taken off of work Thursday and Friday in anticipation of AirVenture 2008 but didn’t have any firm plans. When the time came I had pretty much decided that I wasn’t going to AirVenture this year breaking my 7 year attendance run. However a friend of mine, Jeff, who gives a forum talk on PPG’s at AirVenture posted that he was going up for the day on Saturday and asked if anyone wanted to join him. Jeff owns a 1956 Bonanza and lives near me so I jumped at the opportunity to fly into KOSH during AirVenture. This is something I would like to do myself sometime but wanted to go with someone who has done it first. Jeff flys 737’s for a living and has flown into AirVenture many times before so who better to go with and learn from.

We launched from LL10 around 7:20 and were at AirVenture at about 8:30am. The flight in couldn’t have been smoother. It was a clear morning and we filed right into traffic at Ripon. Since Jeff’s plane is considered Vintage we got to land on runway 36R and park in the vintage aircraft parking. This parking is conveniently located right along the NS runway between the Ultralight area and AeroShell square. I mainly meandered around the grounds. Picked up some LSA brochures, took pictures of some planes, and met up with a few PPG pilots who were also attending. We departed right after the airshow ended and were back home by 8pm. This is definitely the way to go to AirVenture especially if only going for the day. It beats the 3.5 hour one way drive to get there and have now been to AirVenture 8 years in a row.

My photo dump is here. I have video of the flight in and out of AirVenture but am still editing it.

On Sunday I took some friends from church up for a ride in the Cessna. I’m part of the tech crew at church and I took Josh who is our tech director and Kevin who is also on the tech crew. They are both aspiring pilots. Since we were going up they decided to get some video footage for possible use in a future sermon series. We had a wireless transmitter hooked up to one of the audio jacks in the plane so the video camera would pick up our audio communication. I practiced turns around a point around the church while they shot video and stills. Then we headed out west to Illinois Valley Regional (KVYS). We got out to stretch our legs and Josh and Kevin changed seats. On departure I flew along the Illinois river next to Starved Rock and Ottawa, IL. We then headed to Aurora (KARR) airport so they could see what flying into a controlled airport was like. We made right traffic for 18 and watched the 2 C130’s that had just landed taxi to the ramp. The NS runway at Aurora is in disrepair. It’s almost a grass runway now with all the grass growing through the cracks. I did a full stop taxi back landing then departed to the east for LL10. We landed back at LL10 on 18 in the grass. The landing was a greaser except for the roughness of the grass.

This weekend I finally got to fly into AirVenture, log 1.8 hours in the Cessna, and give 2 aspiring pilots a little taste of what the freedom of flight offers.

Lotus Notes/Domino superior availability

2008-07-28T09:42:00.000-05:00

This past weekend we had an issue with one of our primary systems which hosts 2 primary Domino mail servers. The system went down completely taking down all hosted Domino partitions with it. Since we have clustered Domino servers this was a non-issue. The cluster nodes for these primary Domino servers are on a totally separate system. Specifically a separate machine, disk, and location. Since the Notes client is cluster aware it failed over to the cluster nodes automatically. The most a user has to do is close their mail file (not restart Notes) and re-open it.

This is something Outlook and Exchange cannot natively do. Outlook is in no way cluster aware so there is no automatic failover. It relies on DNS to point it to the Exchange server. Exchange has 2 clustering methods neither of which is as good as Domino. You can use Windows clustering with Exchange which requires shared disk. If your disk goes or the storage group gets corrupted then this type of clustering does no good. Exchange 2007 has continuous cluster replication now which is simply transaction log shipping. This cluster replication is supported only on the same LAN meaning local. If the local LAN or building power goes down, so does the cluster.

With either method the DNS needs to be updated or a server needs to assume the previous server IP address in order for Outlook to work. This takes time and is not immediate.

This is why there is a whole third party industry built around keeping Exchange available. This third party industry and associated extra cost doesn’t exist for Domino. Domino provides the best of breed service out of the box.

Before the flames start about how Notes sucks this post is specific to clustering. Lotus Domino is far superior when it comes to availability options. Outlook may be prettier but it doesn’t do much good when you can’t send and receive e-mail.

Flight Log - PPG: Dream Flight

2008-07-27T21:28:00.000-05:00

Tonight was one of those glass smooth evenings we haven’t had too many of this year. I arrived at the Polo field around 6pm to a light SW wind and setup for an easy forward launch. Another pilot was already airborne and two more showed up as I was getting ready to launch.

I circled the Polo field for a bit then headed for some high level cruising. Then it was off to the sod farm. After a couple passes I did some foot drags. This was the first time I have done actual foot drags. I have skimmed the ground down low before but this was the first time doing actual foot drags. It was fairly easy with the silk smooth air.

I then went back to the Polo field. I climbed up high and did some spirals down with engine at idle. This is a good practice to judge gliding and landing with an engine out. I did a few of these. It’s also fun when you can throttle up and do it again.

I put 1.2 hours on the motor and came in for a smooth landing right by my car. There was a storm front heading our way so I wanted to get down before anything hit. It was definitely the calm before the storm. The storm ended up going south.

The 30 minute Major Server Upgrade

2008-07-18T13:24:00.000-05:00

I upgraded our Domino administration server to Domino 8.0.1 last night. This is the first production server to be upgraded to the R8 code. It took all of 30 minutes to accomplish. The title says Major Upgrade which it is in terms of features but not in terms of administrator time or down time.

I followed the IBM technote on upgrading from R7 to R8 except I didn’t see the need to run fixup, updall and compact on every single database on the server. Since this can be done while the server is online for non system databases I figured it could be done after the upgrade. Compact is run weekly and Updall run nightly anyway. So, I put together the batch files below. One to run prior to the upgrade and one for after. They take care of running the recommended utilities against the system databases. It took a while to compact statrep since it is 1 GB in size. I’ve been attending too many of Andy’s statistics presentations.

Since our Domino directory already had the 8.0.1 design applied a couple months ago I didn’t run the designer task for names.nsf. When you start the R8 server for the first time it will automatically upgrade events4 and ddm databases. So the only design update I ran outside of the server was for AdminP.

*** A warning about templates ***
If your users replicate their personal address books to the server for access by assistants or BES, delete pernames.ntf. If you don’t and replicate templates, all your users will get the R8 personal address book if they inherit from the standard template. This happened to me so a lot of people (not everyone) got a taste of the R8 PNAB. It works for the most part in an R7 client and people liked the look of it. Unfortunately we are converting it back now. Obviously you should remove any other standard templates you use and don’t want the databases upgraded just yet. I wish IBM would treat the pernames.ntf like the mail template. Make a separate pernames7.ntf, pernames8.ntf, etc...

Upgrade Scripts

Pre-Upgrade.bat
@echo off

c:
cd \Lotus\domino
nfixup names.nsf -f -v -l
nfixup admin4.nsf -f -v -l
nfixup events4.nsf -f -v -l
nfixup statrep.nsf -f -v -l
nfixup catalog.nsf -f -v -l
nfixup ddm.nsf -f -v -l

ncompact names.nsf -c -i
ncompact admin4.nsf -c -i
ncompact events4.nsf -c -i
ncompact statrep.nsf -c -i
ncompact catalog.nsf -c -i
ncompact ddm.nsf -c -i

echo Pre-upgrade process complete.

Post-Upgrade.bat
@echo off

c:
cd \Lotus\domino
ndesign -f admin4.nsf

nfixup names.nsf -f -v -l
nfixup admin4.nsf -f -v -l

ncompact names.nsf -c -i
ncompact admin4.nsf -c -i

nupdall names.nsf -RX
nupdall admin4.nsf -RX

echo Post-upgrade process complete.

Fly-In Report: Kankakee Ultralight 2008

2008-07-14T11:31:00.003-05:00

I attended the Kankakee Ultralight Fly-In this past weekend. It was held at The Ultralight Place which is on the west side of the KIKK airport. This location is home to a bunch of PPC’s but during this fly-in many other types of ultralights descend on the field including us PPGers. Our group attending has been getting larger each year.

This year the weather didn’t do us any favors. We are already limited by wind and thermals in the mid day but the wind never really let up all weekend. There were also a few storms throughout the weekend. I arrived on Thursday ahead of some storms. I scoped out a spot for the weekend and setup my tent. I visited with other pilots while waiting for the storms to pass and hoping for a slice of time good enough to fly before sundown. Well, the storms and wind didn’t accommodate me that night. Two other pilots managed some air time just before a storm came through.

Friday morning looked like it might be a blowout but the wind eventually cooperated and mellowed. The sun was coming up but was behind clouds so the thermals remained at bay for longer than usual. I got all my equipment out to the field and setup to do a forward launch. Another pilot was setup next to me and launched first. He ended up slipping on his run and falling to the ground. His prop, netting, frame and later discovered his wing suffered damage. Since he was in front of me and off to my right I figured I would try to maneuver around him on my launch. The combination of this maneuvering and my anxiousness to get in the air didn’t bode well for me. My wing went to the right as I was trying to maneuver to the left. It pulled me right, I went to my knees and managed to only tap the ground with the frame. This was enough to ding the prop where a previous repair had been made. That prop needed repair and I left my spare prop at home. No flying for me that morning.

Mike offered me his motor later but I haven’t flown other motors before so wasn’t comfortable strapping his on. I have a high hook in motor and his is a low hook in motor. That is a big difference for me but the gesture was appreciated.

Since the weather forecast wasn’t looking very good and I only live an hour away I decided to pack up. I headed back home and watched the weather. I started the repairs on my prop and it was nice spending Friday evening in my own bed. Storms rolled through Friday evening and it rained most of the morning on Saturday. The afternoon cleared up and looked good so I headed back to Kankakee with my spare prop ready to go. A lot more people were there since Saturday is the main day of the fly-in. I missed the pig roast for lunch but there were left overs for dinner. They have a wonderful chef at this event who cooks breakfast, lunch, and dinner during the fly-in.

There were many terms used to describe the Saturday evening air; salty, soupy, a lot of texture, character, active. It was active with a reported 4 on the bump scale early on. Even Jeff G. who flys in anything said he didn’t like the air. After kitting a while I decided to go for a flight right at sunset. It was an easy forward launch and the sky definitely had character. Down low it was turbulent but not rough. It was more of a smooth knocking around versus hard lift and sink. Up high were strong winds causing us to be para-parked. The sunset provided a nice view to look at while going nowhere. Turning to the east I had to be ahead of the wing mentally so as not to get blown over the main runway. I ended up with about a 10 minute flight which was enough for me in those conditions.

Everyone thought Sunday morning would be perfect. No storms and forecast light winds. I woke up at 5 am to the sound of leaves rustling already. That didn’t sound good. I looked at the wind sock and it was dancing around in the early morning wind. Some pilots launched and there were reports that the conditions were worse that the previous evening. Only one pilot stayed up for 20 minutes. The rest were down within about 10 minutes. I elected to stay on the ground and take pictures and video of the fun. The remainder of the morning was spent visiting, packing up, and talking about upcoming fly-in plans.

Even though the weather didn’t cooperate this weekend it was still a good time visiting with people that have similar interests. Below are links to photos I took at the event.

Kankakee Photos

Kankakee Ultralight Fly-In

2008-07-02T19:16:00.000-05:00

The 3rd annual Ultralight Fly-In is taking place in Kankakee, IL at the Greater Kankakee (KIKK) airport July 11th through July 13th. All kinds of ultralights will be descending on the Kankakee area at The Ultralight Place which is on the west side of the airport.

This will be my first year attending and am planning on arriving on the 10th and staying through the weekend with my PPG. This is turning into a major fly-in for PPG’s. Last year was the first time a bunch of PPG pilots attended this fly-in and this year looks like even more (including myself) will be there. There is even word at least one international pilot will be there.

If you want to check out some ways that flying is still affordable or join us in the air come on out to the airport. Here are some videos from last years fly-in... Dave and Lance.

Hawaii - Day 7

2008-06-24T17:03:00.000-05:00

Today is travel day back home. We took our time getting up and packing. We stopped at the Kauai Harley Davidson dealership to pick up shirts for my sister and brother in-law.

We got exit row seats for out flight from Kauai to San Francisco so we didn’t have to pay for Economy Plus. They wanted to charge us $54 each for Economy Plus. What happened to $29?

On the flight from San Francisco to Chicago we were in standard economy which is not good for a 6’ 3“ long legged person like me. I tried to sleep on this flight but it didn’t work. We left Kauai at 1:30pm Hawaii time and arrived home at 5:00am Chicago time with no sleep. So we basically lost an night. Beth and I went to bed when we got home at 6am. I was then awaken at 10 by my kids. My mother-in-law had brought them home and they were excited to see us.

Now it’s time to unpack, clean up the house, edit pictures and video, and get back to a Chicago schedule. Where is that housekeeping service?

Hawaii - Day 6

2008-06-23T20:33:00.000-05:00

This morning I wanted to head to Waimea canyon and try to get some pictures of the canyon with the sunrise. We didn’t exactly make it there at sunrise but I got some good pictures. I think the canyon walls are illuminated more at sunset but there tends to be clouds around then. We drove up Waimea Canyon Road (550) from 50. Take this road up. Don’t follow the signs that take you down 50 farther and then up 552. This road ultimately intersects with 550 and 550 has much better scenery from what I hear.

We stopped at some road side view points and then at the Kokee Lodge. This lodge is part of the state park and serves breakfast and lunch. This is also one of the best souvenir spots on the island. We also had a light lunch here on the way back down. More on that below.

We took 550 all the way until it ends. There is a lookout here that looks over a spectacular valley that leads into the sea with spire cliffs on each side. There is a hiking trail (Pihea Trail) from the lookout that basically offers different views of the same valley. Be warned though, this trail gets tougher after the half mile mark. I hiked a mile down the trail but Beth stopped about three quarters of the way to wait for me. There is a lot of great scenery but it does get muddy and there are some steep, slippery climbs. We saw some people much older than us along the way so it’s doable by most anyone but be prepared. This hike and the helicopter tour are the highlights of this trip so far.

We headed back down to the lodge for lunch and to clean the red mud off of our shoes. There are public restrooms and washing stations near the lodge. Also be aware that going up 550 past the lodge the road gets a little rough.

We made our way back to the B&B and decided to just hang out at their pool for a while. No sand to clean off and it was close. We then had dinner at Poipu Beach Brolier. This place was excellent for me. A nice casual open air restaurant with great food (fish and steak fare) and right size portions for me. One thing we noticed with most of the restaurants is they are open air (roof with open sides) but yet there are no bugs. No mosquitos and very very few flies if any. There were more birds in the eating areas on Maui than Kauai but even they weren’t bothersome. Kauai has a lot of chickens roaming around but obviously not in the restaurants.

After dinner we went to see Spouting Horn. This is a lava shelf next to the water with a hole in it allowing water to shoot up into the air when the waves come in. There is also a second hole where only air is forced through making a sound like you hear when yo blow across the top of a soda bottle. There was another hole that would spout water much higher than the current one but back in the early 1900’s a land owner blew it up because the salt spray was hurting his crops. Today it is just a big hole where water goes in and out of from the sea. This is a neat thing to see if you are on the south shore of Kauai. It’s better during high tide which is when we were there.

Tomorrow we begin the trip home ☹.

Hawaii - Day 5

2008-06-22T20:00:00.000-05:00

We started today off with a helicopter tour with Blue Hawaiian. What a great way to see parts of the island that you can’t get to any other way. Being a pilot I was as much interested in the helicopter as the scenery. This was an hour tour of the entire island. Blue Hawaiian video tapes every flight and has the video of your specific flight available after the flight. They have a camera inside the helicopter as well as outside and the pilot switches between the 2 during flight. All audio conversation and music is also recorded on the DVD. We got a copy for the girls to see. The pilots narrate the flight and show where movies were filmed, the Na Pali coast, Waimea canyon, and we even were able to go into the volcano crater. We had Cliff for a pilot and he was excellent.

After the helicopter tour we drove to one of the easily accessible waterfalls, Wailua Falls. This is a tall waterfall and was used in the opening scene of Fantasy Island. I’ll have some pictures of it posted on Flickr when I get back home. Since we were headed North anyway I continued to drive to the North side of the island. We went past Princeville and stopped at some beaches and shops along the way. Unfortunately since this was an unplanned drive we didn’t have any swim wear with us. The North shore is supposed to be the best place for snorkeling on the island.

We made our way back to the B&B and changed into our swimwear. Marjorie’s (the B&B) has beach chairs, coolers, mats and snorkel equipment for use by the guests. We took advantage of this and spent the afternoon at Poipu Beach. This beach is a favorite with locals and has lifeguards. It is supposed to be good for snorkeling but from what I saw it was just rocks. A good spot for the beginner though. We also had some boogie boards from Marjorie’s but I wasn’t sure how to use them so we just floated on them.

After the beach we got cleaned up and had dinner at Duke’s Canoe Club. This restaurant is part of the Kauai Marriott so was very busy. We had about an hour wait and I was unimpressed with the service. It could have just been the amount of people in there. I had the prime rib which was good but a little too much fat. They also have calamari strips here versus the tentacles we have on the mainland. We have had these at 2 places now and they are good. Long meaty strips of calamari.

While we waited for dinner we strolled the grounds of the Marriott. It’s a typical Hawaii resort with many rooms (some with a decent view and some without), a very big pool right next to the beach, and a lot of activities available for guests. It’s located in a secluded bay so offers protected swimming on the beach. There is also the big pool if you like too only look at the ocean versus swim in it.