Episode 50, recorded Thursday 5th May 2011, discussing backup/recovery/management of IBM Collaboration Solutions technologies, why IBM Connections is possibly a ‘non-specific item restorable product’ and more…
(Stuart here, I think this is a fascinating discussion – one of the best we’ve had on This Week in Lotus. If you know someone in the Lotus product teams at IBM that should hear the points made in this episode, please please pass them the details. If you are a customer that wants issues such as these resolved, again please tell your IBM contacts. Thank you!)
Hosts
Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)
Guests
 | Sean Burgess (blog | twitter | company) is a Senior Certified Advanced Lotus Notes Developer skilled in development of applications including project tracking, workflow, change management, and information publishing in Notes and to the Intranet/Internet via Domino. Experienced with large scale administration and deployment of Notes including initial server setup/installation and remote access. Interfaces professionally with all levels of the organization from management, for project/capabilities presentations, to staff, for training and project management, to end users, for understanding needs and gathering requirements. |
 | Chris Whisonant (blog | twitter | company) is a Lotus Consultant with GROUP Business Software (GBS). Chris supports the broad suite of Lotus Software running on virtually every supported operating system. Chris has spoken at the Lotusphere and COMMON conferences and is the lead administrator of the BleedYellow services. |
 | Sharon Bellamy (blog | twitter | company) is Lead IBM solutions specialist at City University London.Sharon supports all of the IBM / Lotus / Tivoli stack at City and will soon be taking on the Domino implementation at the Cass Business School. |
 | Dave Hay ( blog | twitter | company ) is an Infrastructure Architect, specializing in Portal and Collaboration solutions, in the IBM Software Services for Lotus (ISSL) team, working mainly in the UK and Ireland. Dave has recently been involved with the delivery of an enterprise-wide collaboration solution for a large UK customer, based upon IBM Connections 3 and WebSphere Portal 7. |
Topics
Backup and Recovery / Management of Lotus technology:
- Sean raised issue with recovering Connections community after deletion, replicated issue that Sharon had at City. Prompted thoughts and discussions about best practice for management of both traditional Domino/Notes and Websphere-based infrastructure
So let’s kick off with Domino. All of us on the call have been working with Domino for years
- What have we learnt about backup/recovery – how is it done best?
- Foundations did it best. Bit level backups of safe replicas of the databases. No downtime and easy recovery.
- What tools have we used?
- How do you handle recovery of individual mailboxes/blogs/teamrooms/apps?
- How about document-level recovery?
Now, many Lotus products are now WebSphere based – Sametime8.5, QuickrJ, Connections, Portal etc
- How do we go about backing these up, given three layer model?
- What about restores? (how do we handle mixture of DB and file store?)
- How do we handle document-level restores?
- Should we be looking to IBM/Tivoli to resolve this or third parties?
- How about soft-delete? Is that the way forward?
Other topics:
Tips
Darren | | Talking of backups, to backup PC’s or laptops I use Acronis. Very impressive product. |
Sean | | JQuery – use it! |
Chris | | HAProxy – very easy to configure load balancer! Can do http but also other ports – e.g. running one HAProxy server to balance QuickrD, Sametime Chat, LDAP, iNotes. Only limitation is no https. Have a brief story about trying to setup Websphere Edge Components vs. HAProxy. |
Sharon | | Skype chats – there are a number of them set up now – Connections (and some portal), Quickr and a sametime one – brilliant for asking questions, confirming your sanity and sharing your knowledge. |
Dave | | The HTTPS Everywhere plugin for Firefox, as mentioned on the Guardian TechWeekly podcast a few weeks back, helps secure connectivity to websites such Twitter, Facebook, Google etc. “forcing”HTTPS rather than HTTP. |
Stuart | | Use the forums – a great way to self-help and find answers to your issues, e.g. with backup. Even better, replicate them in your Notes client. Instructions here. Use them or lose them! |