Live from Austin!

Lotus Domino 7 has an unfortunate bug which means that you can’t cross-certify with another organization via phone or e-mail, by using the Domino Administrator, choosing Cross Certify Key… and entering their key ID. The bug is documented in the readme.pdf, and is still unfixed as of 7.0.2. It results in server errors saying “The subject’s public key found in the cross certificate does not match the one found in the certificate table.”

[Update 2006-05-17: I'm pleased to say that I heard today they've managed to squeeze a fix for the problem into 7.0.2. This is not an official statement of support from IBM, etc etc.]

This is a problem in situations where you want to cross-certify your server with someone else’s, but for whatever reasons they can’t or won’t give you access to CERT.ID, and can’t engage the cooperation of the owners of their CERT.ID.

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Well, I hated SuSE so much that in desperation I decided to try Gentoo running the latest kernel 2.6 test release, to see if the threading in that was viable enough that it would run the binary-only software in question… aw, hell, I may as well admit it’s the Lotus Domino Server 6.5.

Anyway, it worked. So now I’ve got Domino 6.5 running on Gentoo, with full SMP support. It wouldn’t run on RedHat, but kernel 2.6 includes all the good stuff. Now to see if I can get RAID-5 set up. Sure, it’s not a supported configuration, but it’s not like we’re entitled to any support anyway.

My main beef with SuSE, in the end, turned out to be the awfulness of the update process. Download ISOs of a service pack CD, mount them via loopback, start an ugly full-screen application, tell it where the CD is mounted, then wait as it takes forever to apply the patches. Finally it brought up a dialog saying “ERROR: Update complete”, and I almost died laughing. There’s supposed to be a network-based update process, but I couldn’t coax it into working after trying three different sets of what claimed to be update servers.

The iSeries team at IBM in Rochester, MN put together a computer with 128GiB of RAM, 24 600MHz PowerPC processors, 5 100baseT ethernet adaptors, and an array of 270 8.5GiB hard drives.

To load it down, they needed 67 more computers to simulate the expected load of 100,000 simultaneous Notes users. Each simulated user sent e-mail to random other users, scrolled through views, opened databases, and so on. Average server response time was 67 msec; during the 6+ hour test, 97% of the mail generated was delivered, and the system didn’t become bogged down.

I’ve often wondered what they do in IBM Rochester, as we’ve driven past a few times. I guess now I know. Me, I just like reading through the numbers and marveling at it all.

From The Onion:

“Everyone’s completely addicted to this one weird game where a little man shaped like a domino walks through a grocery store. Once I stayed up until 3 a.m. playing it.”

I have that game. It’s called “No One Can Stop Mr Domino!”. It is indeed quite fun, though it gets a bit too difficult a bit too quickly.

Almost finished another dynamic web site / content management system today. It produces the same look and feel as the main IBM web site; I can’t show it off to everyone, unfortunately, because it’ll be password-protected when it goes live.

Anyway, I say “almost” because there’s a bizarre bug, and I was quite unable to track down the cause. I came home instead. I’m counting on one of two things to happen: either I’ll go in tomorrow and the bug will have mysteriously vanished when the server does its general housekeeping stuff overnight, or my subconscious will quietly work on the problem, and I’ll walk in with my latte, look at the code, and say “Aha!”

The latter might sound pretty far-fetched, but it happens all the time.