Webcast Invitation Reschedule: Recommended Best Practices for Domino on System i on October 8, 2008

HCL Domino Domino Forum
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This Webcast has been rescheduled to October 8, 2008 from the original date of October 2, 2008. The length is 1.5 hours with a Q&A session following the presentation. Please be sure to use the RSVP link below before the Webcast to register and receive the dial-in details. As always, there is no charge for participating.

Title: Recommended Best Practices for Domino on System i

Date: October 8, 2008 (Wednesday)

Time: 10:00am - 11:30pm Eastern US time (GMT -4)

Conference URL: http://www.webdialogs.com/join/?schedid=8732769

Audio by phone:

Please use the RSVP link to register, the dial-in will then be e-mailed. dial in 5-10 minutes early to allow time for registration of all participants before the presentation starts.

RSVP link: http://ww4.premconf.com/webrsvp/register?conf_id=1781248

Session Details:

This Webcast covers recommendations from IBM Support for best practices for a Domino server on the System i platform. While there are many Best Practices documents available for your Domino System i server, this particular document focuses on a few common problems and pitfalls more commonly encountered and reported to IBM Support, how to prevent them, and how to expedite problem resolution when they do occur.

In short, if Domino Support could offer key advice for the well-being of any Domino on System i production environment, what would it be?

When RSVPing and Dialing In:

When RSVPing, you will be requested to provide your name, company, e-mail address and phone number. Once you register, you will be provided the toll-free dial-in numbers both on-line and in e-mail, if requested.

When dialing in the day of the Webcast, you will need to provide your name and company affiliation. You will need a touch tone phone to be able to ask questions. The presentation will be recorded and (in potentially edited form) made available via the web page containing dial-in numbers above.

You can find an up-to-date schedule of upcoming Open Mic calls and Webcast calls, as well as links to slides and recordings from past calls, here: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg27011126

Open Mic calls are Question & Answer sessions with a panel of subject matter experts covering your questions without going thru a slide presentation.

Webcasts are slide presentations by a single presenter followed by Questions & Answers related to the material covered, as time permits.

Please remember to book your calendar for this call. We look forward to talking with you!

The IBM Notes/Domino on System i team

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Subject: Questions for the call

I have 2 “Best Practice” related questions.

First some background. I’m a full time developer but only a backup administrator. We have several iSeries machines in out company. One is dedicated solely to domino. The dedicated box has 6 servers on it. Partitioned I believe. 5 are in our production domain and 1 is a test/development domain. The production servers are clustered to a server running on Windows for high availability.

Question1: I don’t think we are using transaction logging anywhere. When I looked into this the recommendation seemed to be have a dedicated drive for transaction logging and not to put it on a raid drive with the servers and OS. My understanding is the iSeries is totally on Raid and that the OS/400 code “knows what to do”. So is there a best practice to run transaction logging on iSeries or not?

Question2: Of our 5 production servers they are designated for specific purposes. 1 for internet gateway mail, 1 for internal mail, 1 for internal applications, 1 for sales applications and mail, and 1 for faxing.

While we like the thought of if one server has a problem, other business functions are not affected, I wonder if we’re too seperated. Is there a best practice on the performance benefits of seperating into smaller servers vs having fewer servers that do more? We have less the 400 active Notes users…

Thank You

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Subject: In response to David’s questions

  1. Running with Transaction Logging is always best practice and thus strongly recommended. On System i, due the single level architecture there has been found to be no benefit from writing the TL to a seperate/dedicated drive, and thus taking the default configuration is fine.

  2. Although potentially more work, from a production serviceability standpoint, having a greater number of dedicated servers usually leads to more stable results and potentially fewer pitfalls from Domino product compatibility. It also means that any outage of a given server affects less of your environment. Generally it is recommended that you dedicate servers to different roles, for more reasons than just performance. Your reported topology should not cause any problems.

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Subject: Response to questions raised during the call

There were several questions raised at the end of the Best Practices presentation that were saved to be answered on the forum. Here are those questions and their answers:

  1. When a piece of mail is rejected for going over the maximum mail transfer size, it returns the email with all attachments intact, taking up extra space in the user’s mail file. Is there a way to change this?
  • Starting in Domino 7.0.1, you can use the following two notes.ini parameters together:

RouterMaxEffectiveSize=xx

(Where xx is a size in Kilobytes.)

RouterMaxEffectiveSizeIncAttach=1

(This tells it to include attachments in calculating mail transfer size)

After setting these, you will need to restart Router and SMTP. Also, if you have more than one Domino mail / SMTP gateway server, these will need to be set on all such servers. This parameter will return a delivery failure if a piece of mail violates the limit, and will NOT include the attachment when returning the message.

Alternately, you can use a server side mail rule that specifies a maximum mail size (specifically, When size is greater than xx (in bytes), don’t accept message). This will generate a popup for Notes users, preventing them from sending the offending email in the first place.

  1. How many databases (mail files) can be safely contained in the /mail directory, before it needs to be broken out into /mail1, /mail2, and so forth?
  • There is no defined limit, aside from the unavoidable architectural and physical space limitations. The ability to branch out into other directories to store mail is purely an organizational tool, rather than a necessary one.
  1. What’s new in Notes/Domino 8?
  • Rather than recount the long list here, I’ll link to an excellent document already published that covers this topic:

A complete list of updates can be found in the Domino 8 Release Notes:

  1. How can you retrieve a user’s group membership? In other words, how can you go about getting a list of all groups a user belongs to?
  • Open your Domino Administrator. Go to the People & Groups tab → Domino Directories → YourDomain’s Directory → Groups. Click the button ‘Find Group Member’ on the top bar of the center pane. You will be prompted for the Common Name you want to find, enter the name of the user in question. When you hit OK, it will take you back to the Groups view, but there will be a checkmark next to every group that user belongs to.