Moving Blog and Rebranding

Victor Toal  May 8 2010 10:00:43 AM

Hi Everybody!

I have been working on re-branding my blog and redesigning it for some time. As of today, I have moved this blog to it's new home:

Notesbusters.com

Here the updated feed link:
http://notesbusters.com/feed/
http://notesbusters.com/comments/feed/

I hope to see 'all over there soon!


Victor

PS: I will be keeping this blog around for a while until people had a chance to update their subscriptions, but it will be stale as old bread soon .....

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Psst ... its a secret

Victor Toal  February 3 2010 12:17:52 PM

Psst ... don't tell anybody!

I am working on re-branding my blog and changing design, platform and , and, and ..... hence the silence since Lotusphere. No, I am not quiet and bitter  because I lost to the (flying) Dutchman at Lotusphere Idol .... he deserved it his subsequent presentation was a success. Jim Casale actually has some video available which I might post at some later time.

I just got right back into a project that had some deadlines and now I am on a deadline myself regarding my blog. I would like to take this to the next level and for me to do that I have to change everything ... so stay tuned and in the next 2-3 weeks you should see an announcement with interesting news.

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Lotus Protector - the first hickup

Victor Toal  January 16 2010 04:07:08 PM

This is going to be a real quick one, since it is just a day before Lotusphere and I actually have other things to do than to fiddle with Lotus Protector and blog about it - but if I don't write it down now, I will forget about it soon.

Today I had my first hick-up with Lotus Protector. We had a power outage this morning and it lasted longer than my UPS system was able to keep the servers up and running. I was out of the house and could not bring the servers down gracefully so I had a hard crash of the VMWare server that hosts LP. It came back up but for some reason something was not initializing correctly. It would not start the http stack so I could not connect to the admin interface and logging in via the console took me into the setup routine (passwords, host name, ip address, etc.)  but would never let me go to the actual prompt after that so I could have a look at the guts of the beast and figure out what is causing the indigestion.

Being that this is the day before I am leaving for LS10 and I have zero time to waste, I simply went back to a VMWare snap shot I had taken and restarted the instance ...and voila, there she goes. The system downloaded the latest spam and AV definitions in about 3 minutes, updated it's time and date and I received my first mails within 2 minutes of the system starting.

Now, this is impressive, though I regret not having the time to spend on dissecting the server, looking into log files etc. to find out exactly what was wrong and fix the actual issue. I am not hoping that this happens again, but if it does, I hope I can find the time to spend on trouble-shooting.

In any case, having a snapshot of a clean setup is a great was to go and restore in the case of a catastrophic failure. As long as you update that snapshot after any configuration change, you should be alright.

See y'all at Lotusphere!!!

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Lotus Protector - Good technology still needs "athinking"

Victor Toal  January 13 2010 08:47:30 AM

Another tale in the life of a Lotus Protector admin.

The system is humming along in the background and rarely needs looking at. In my idle moments (I have none right now) I look at statistics etc., but other than that ... nothing. Until this last weekend. I was getting used to the fact that I now have less mail, or so I thought. It was still after the new year, things are less busy, even the spammers are still waking up from their new years party comas and send out less garbage.

Last week I was briefly in touch with a buddy of mine, and we loosely agreed to get together on the weekend and we were moving the conversation to e-mail. Then over the weekend he fell silent .. no response to some of my mails. Well, he gets busy now and then and has not responded at other occasions so it did not alarm me. Too bad, we wanted to grab lunch and watch the movie "The book of Eli".

Turns out he did answer ... but Lotus Protector tagged it as spam. Specifically I had it set up to tag the subject line with the [SPAM] and guess what ... I had an older mail rule that I had not looked at for a while that kicked in ... yeah - my buddy has been sent directly into the Junk Mail folder in my mail file. I found his mails (he frantically answered 3 times) and allot of other mails I had been missing in there.

So, what does this highlight? That systems will do what you tell them. Good systems will do EXACLTLY what you tell them and it is up to you to act accordingly. So this acts as a cautionary tale to check settings and review things. Especially when you notice "lite mail volume" - something is up! You have to check where all that stuff went to.

I just want to mention once more - this is not a Protector issue, it is a stupid admin issue. Imagine this in an environment with a few thousand users .... I would be running around the clock right now to check people's mail files for mail rules AND changing the rules on Protector to change that [SPAM] prefix to something else.

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LS10 - Speaking for PistolStar at Lotusphere

Victor Toal  January 8 2010 12:45:53 PM

 So, what else am I doing at Lotusphere?

Well, for those interested, I was also asked by PistolStar to present at a function they are giving at Lotusphere for their customers ad anybody else who might wants to listen i. The presentation is on authentication in general, the challenges that companies face, recent trends in authentication (dangers, technical innovations, customer case studies) etc.

Note the time and place - right before Lotusphere Idol. We start at 2 PM sharp and at the conclusion I hand over the reigns to the PistolStar technical folks that will then do a Q&A with participants on the merits and capabilities of their products and authentication.

See y'all there!

Bound2Authenticate    Presented By Victor Toal   When: Tuesday, January 19, 2010 2:00pm-4:00pm Where: Lotusphere, Swan Hotel, Ibis Room An exclusive raffle is offered to all attendees.   Speaker Information: Victor Toal is a messaging and collaboration architect and engineer with more than 15 years experience with Domino (since R 4.1), Sametime, Quickr, Lotus Connections, and WebSphere. Victor's clients include the Pentagon, US Army, banks, as well as manufacturing, tourism, and medical companies. He has worked in the US and overseas (Japan, Austria, Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, Poland, and Czech Republic) and speaks fluent German and Japanese. He is certified in Domino R4-R8.5 and Sametime 7.5 and 8.0.   Unable to attend? Request a recording of the presentation by visiting the Contact Us page.       Come stop by booth #324 to learn more about: PortalGuard: A password authentication and security solution that allows end-users to securely authenticate and manage a portal password directly from a Web browser. Tailored Authentication: For a unique environment and/or situation, which requires specific functionality, our team would make the necessary adaptations to meet or exceed your security objectives, and provide a fully supported product. Rule-based Alerts: Security - Activity Monitoring - making early predictions leads to being proactive instead of reactive.

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