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You're being ADSL

Posted on 2 Jul 2002 at 17:12

While ADSL in the US seems to be standard fare, in good old Blighty we're taking it a bit more slowly. And we're right to be wary, says Steve Cassidy

Just how bad can this get? Well it's late May as I write this and the Windows 2000-compliant version of Lotus Domino Server has only just hit the Web. This is version 5.0.3, and if you've been wrestling with version 5 under Windows 2000 you'll already have seen problems that fill the Lotus Support Forums at www.notes.net. Windows 2000 Server didn't like Notes 5 one bit, which is odd because Windows 2000 Professional seems to get on with the Domino Client perfectly well. Lots of people can't get their Notes servers to talk through SMTP while they're using Windows 2000, because of some alteration to the way Windows 2000 uses DNS. One might expect the bits of the system that look up DNS entries under Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2000 Pro to be the same, and hence for both Domino Client and Server to be affected, but it's only the Server.

I tried to install Domino on Windows 2000 and everything ran absolutely fine, until I left the server in the basement and ran Timbuktu to remote-control it from the Mac G4 upstairs. There's the usual madness with setting up Domino for the very first time, where it hides the user ID, which you absolutely must have within a system configuration document (the Domino Directory) so that clients that wish to connect must get everything exactly right to retrieve that file by their bootstraps. I wanted to use Timbuktu to avoid running up and down the basement ladder to grope inside the 'configuration Wizard' and winkle out that ID file then move it across the LAN to the workstation. No such luck: even before I got that far the Timbuktu client would drop the line with 'No response from host'.

Timbuktu is installed as a service, so even when machines reboot it can be reconnected to complete logging in, but on this occasion no matter how long I waited I wasn't being allowed in. I ran downstairs to see my first ever Windows 2000 blue screen, which needed a key press to carry on, but the message was clear enough - no likelihood of a functioning Notes server soon on my Windows 2000 server. Off to the Web and it turns out the maintenance release to upgrade a Domino server one version to 5.0.3 is a whopping 40Mb download - and I was several versions behind, so the patches to get from where I was to 5.0.3 added up to more than 100Mb. Also, try as I might, I couldn't make any of the download-resuming tools work with the Lotus support sites, and due to either high-demand or broken load-balancing, resuming was definitely needed.

But not all is dark on the Lotus front. A gaggle of people from Iris (the company Lotus spun off to develop Domino) flew into London a few weeks back to demonstrate some new tools coming along very nicely. The demo machinery they used was very revealing: a pile of ThinkPads running NT 4 with all the various Domino-layered products on top, sat on a desk at one end of the room linked to a tiny 3Com hub. I was impressed by the adeptness with which the Iris team handled very early betas - the confidence to run a Domino server, a copy of Freelance for your slides and a dev copy of the software you're describing all on the one machine is a strong testament of some kind.

Two systems they demonstrated really caught my eye. One, called Raven, is rather like having an AltaVista 'knowledge spider' system for your Notes data but will be a while yet, but the other, called QuickPlace, is likely to be available just as this issue of PC Pro hits the newsstands. They've even registered www.quickplace.com so you can see this thing in action - it's the Domino-hosted way to have team discussions using Web browsers, clearly aimed as a counter to Office 2000's move to provide such services via IIS. As befits a product from a firm that's been in the group discussion field for more than seven years, QuickPlace shows that it's thought about how people really work together, rather than how they ought to work together. As soon as I get a Domino server to run stably on my setup here I'll be looking very closely at QuickPlace.