Lotus Notes 8 on SLackware 12

Today I successfully managed to install IBM Lotus Notes 8 onto my Slackware 12 workstation. To be able to install Lotus Notes I installed GnomeSlacky wich is a project for porting Gnome in a non intrusive way into Slackware. I needed this since Lotus Notes Depends on some of the Gnome project libraries. The installation went quit good apart from the final step wich hang the first time. However after looking at the installation logs I found out that the last step tries to start e local webserver on port 80, since I had Apache running on my workstation the setup could not complete and halted. Thus I stopped my Apache and relaunched the setup, this time all went ok. I started Lotus by typing "/opt/ibm/lotus/notes/notes" into the command line, ( I need to create a shortcut on my desktop or menu for this) and I received the common lotus notes configuration wizard as you get on a windows machine. Once finished you have a nice working Lotus Notes 8 running on Linux.

Linux Clusters

On friday I had talk about Linux Clustering in a Red Hat environment. I've never been in touch with a Linux Cluster. In the past I read something about HA-clusters using "hearthbeat" but there my experience with clusters stop. So wondering about this Clustering I looked up some info on the Red Hat site and where found they have a Cluster Suite in the Red Hat Enterprise 5. Which uses Global Filesystem (GFS) , GFS provides shared filesystem. However "GFS differs from distributed file systems (such as AFS, Coda, or InterMezzo) because it allows all nodes to have direct concurrent access to the same shared block storage" (From Wikipedia ) . Then There's the Cluster suite. There's so much to read about this so I'll just put in some links here that'll take you to the stuff ;)

Red Hat Cluster Suite : Configuring and Managing a Cluster

Red Hat GFS 6.1 : Administrator's Guide

Breaking the silence

It has been some time since i wrote an entry.
But anyhow I wrote already some code for that Java project I have. I've put together what I call a distributed event handler. Well basically you have a Java class EventDispatcher which reads which reads a configuration file (now XML) from which it knows who can handle the various events. In case the the handler is on a remote host it'll open a network connection and write the event object to the network connection. The EventHandler on the other side will handle the received event and reply if needed. I tested this first version and it works even though it is not optimized. I'll try to have the code hosted somewhere and publish link on this blog.

Personal java project

I decided to finally start with a big programming project to increase my Java knowledge. The Idea is to create a web based game like Travian. But in such a wat that it is very flexyble that almost every aspect of the game can be changed with minimal code changes, or better with some kind of plug-in mechanism. As this project is just started it's still an idea. I'll have to start with the analysis and the design phase.

We'll see where I'll get in the future.

Internal Helpdesk fun

Today I received a very funny message in my mailbox from a user complaining about a problem :
"La mia memoria virtuale e' strapiena,me ne scarichi un po' per favore?Ciao"
Translated in english this would be "My virtual memory is full, can you please free some ? Bye "
That's just terrific :)