To keen on "Don't allow URL Open"!!

Well back for ILUG where I attended to Admin Blast session with Paul Mooney, I was packed with tips and good things to with my servers. I could'nt wait.

The "Don't allow URL open" setting on the database seemed like a good place to start.
This property locks down your database for web access. Domino URL's will not work.
You would use this on any database you want to secure.

I ofcourse ran of and put this on our Domino Directory. We don't want anybody to hack their way in to that ofcoure. Turning this seems like a good thing. But there are some gotcha's waiting.

First of all this setting replicates. Beware of that.

You may want to turn "Dont' allow...." on on your web server, but keep it off elsewhere in your production environment. Typically you may have a dedicated web server for inhouse web services and for your Domino Web Access server. You will need the Address Picker in these environment. Turning on "Don't allow URL open" will brake the Address Picker.

You need to be aware of that this setting stops everty url request that has an '?' in it like
myDatabase/myDocument?Openform .. and so on.

Second, the Domino Web Access dailog does use the type of URL that is beeing blocked. My mistake!! I tought it was a servlet. In that case it wouldn't be blocked.

So there you have it. The setting replicates thru you domain and it breaks the Domino Web Access Address Picker. I've asked Paul Mooney about the impact of this setting on BleedYellow, he didn't answer. I guess he left to finnish Fluffy off. My bad for asking silly questions instead of doing my own resarch.

So this setting should probably not be turn on on your administration server. Secure it using ACL. You could however turn this on on other servers that do not replicate back to the admin server ,which in my opinion, Domino Directory databases should not do.

ILUG 08 Day 3

The last day of ILUG 08 is over. Some good session today to.

I've got to hear about Lotus Quickr from Rob Novak. His presentation about Quickr was good and informative. There where goods tips about notes.ini tasks added by Quickr that You don't really need. And Quickr adds a line "ServerTaskAt4" that run some qptools. Just remove this and run the tools yourself when You need too. These qptools tasks takes up huge resources.

Next I was at the Sponsor session where we where introduced to the GSX Monitoring Tools.
Seems very ok. I will check it out.

I really enjoyed Chris Millers' presentation on Sametime Gateway. Very clear and concise presentation about do's and dont's when it comes to setting up and installing the Sametime Gateway. He had his say about the 'networking guys' also.

Closing session was 'Thank You, Tank You", sponsor gifts and "Feck off".

Overall a good three day gig, and the sponsor got more of my attention here compared to Lotusphere. Some other arrangements made me miss out on the speedgeeking but maybe next time.

ILUG 08: Seccond day.

It was an early start this morning compared to yesterday. A lot of information to digest and still more to come I guess.

The session attended today was:

Setting up and Maintaining Domino Test Environments Painlessly.

Rob McDonagh got to swear!! (and Paul Mooney got harrased). Very good and interessting session. A good developement and test environment is my wet dream! We where introduced to some "Bad Ideas" and "Worst practices". I nod my head in confirmation. Then to the best practices. Some good ideas and a tool to "duplicate" users and group for the production to the test environment was presented.


The Day from Notes Hell and How I Got Through it Without Breaking a Sweat.

This was a sponsor session. And that is great. There are many of them and they are scheduled on the same time in all the tracks. This means that you have to attend one.
Ytria have a great set of tools to do all sort of stuff to get you out of almost every whole you could imagine. Used without training and a portion of paranoia Ytria tools will bury you.
Don't get me wrong, the tools are great and I hope my company buys some of them. But with the power to fix things quickly, one could also destroy this just as easily. I guess a good tool in the hands of a fool, still makes him a fool.

The Full Monty 8.5

With the risk of beeing hurt by flying give aways I attended Mary Beth Ravens session, as I promised. Very good session and informative.
In short

• The 8.5 client will be very good!! (Hurrah!!)
• We didn't get everything in there before the deadline (Bummer!)
• We know about the shortcomming, we will fix them (Hurrah!!)
• The client load much much faster!!! (Hurrah!!)
• Cool new calender features (integrate google calendar, iCalendar feeds , other peoples calendar, team calendar etc etc etc.
• There is a new Workplace, expect to put any link on your desktop. (Hurrah!!)
• The horisontal tab is now more like a vertical three structure, sort of bookmarks meets tabs and clearly Windows explorer inspired. Looks great. (Hurrah!)
• The new workplaces does not work! Yet! (Bummer!)

Well there's a lot more to mention. See Bill Buchans blog.

ILUG 08: First day and last night.

And I'm Dublin for ILUG 2008, which I hope (and firmly believe) will be great. If the first evening can be taken as a clue about the follwing days this is promising. I guess it was our Lotusphere backpacks that gave us away, as Mary Beth Raven came up to us and said hello.

For You who don't know she is I can tell You that she is the lead product designer for the Lotus Notes Client. Read her blog, it's first hand information. I got the chance to discuss some features of the Notes Client, and humbly ask for better Citrix presentation support. I'll review them and maybe (It was late!!) post them om Ideajam.net

The first day of ILUG 08 featured and opening session. We were all welcomed by Paul Mooney, and presented key notes by Nick Shelness and Alan Lepofsky. To sum up:
Nick Shelness: We got the computing power but still waiting for the Killer App!.
Alan Lepofsky: Lotus is getting there!!

Now this is my view of what was presented, and I do believe this to be true. Lotus is very inovative and Lotus 8 based application may very well be the "Killer App!" we are waiting for.


Ofcourse I had to attend the Admin Blast session with Paul Mooney. If you ever have the chance, don't miss it. Already seen it? See it again. 90 minutes of great tips, this session is a must. I guess you will find a version of the presentation on his website, go and check it out.

I also attended Bill Buchan session about Web Services. Great!! Some very good information here and some pointers about caveats when it comes to designer/server version mixed.
We where also shown how easily one could make a Webserver comsumer using the generated WSDL file for a web service provider. It's pretty slick.

To top of the day I had to check out the speedsponsoring. Every sponsor got 5 minutes to present their product(s). The whistle blows and I move on to the next stand. And there is a lot of good products here. Some of them seems to meet my company needs and customer needs ofcource. I guess it boils down to pricing and return on investment.