Puuuhhhhblllliiiiisssshhh!
by florian vogler :: Lotus Notes | Lotus Domino
Seems like sentimentality runs rampant: Ed, The Turtle, Carl, Bruce, Karl-Henry, Theo, Kathleen, Nathan (not really ^^), Ed, Rich, and Susan, have blogged on Notes nostalgia these days - more to come I'm sure (I may have missed a post, if so just add yours in the comments, please).
The Turtles article reminded me of "InterNotes WebPublisher" - we were sitting in an office at one of Austria's major banks (Raiffeisen, to be precise) and shouting out "Publish!" every few minutes (yep!) - every time you wanted a web page being translated to HTML (asap), you had to click on a "Publish"-button - god, that was fun!
Starting in 1992 with the ends of Notes 2 and the beginnings of Notes 3 I remember the first thing I wanted to do with/to Notes was add my own "menu form" (an entry page with buttons to create the most important documents, access views, etc.) to a database - and the colleagues, that had started a little earlier with Notes than me, looked at me and said "Never done that (in other words: wasn't possible before) - so why now?". "Soon", Navigators, Framesets, and more were to come - but after all, we were in quite the early days, when you could break everyone of your fingers with the formula language (@Explode, @Implode, @Right, @Left, @Command's at the end of everything else), and then there were flat Notes names (as opposed to hirarchical), tons of hardcoded servernames and more fun.
Sometimes in @formula coding I'm so oldschool that I forget @For and explode and implode as hell - and I also quite frequently forget to use @ThisName and @ThisValue ... *sigh*
The two funniest stories I remember from back then (apart from the Puuuhhhbbllliiiisshh-mania) are actually one:
On the evening before an admin colleague went on holiday, he wanted to kind of clean up the Domino (back then referred to as Notes servers) environment and thus created a notes.ini template which he copied to all servers (whilst maintaining server specific ini entries, unfortunately not all of them) - part of the template was also Setup=...
Now guess what happened? Quite a few of the other Notes servers had had a different value for the Setup= notes.ini entry prior to the clean-up and started to re-create ALL view indexes over night, for views that hadn't been used in quite some time - basically, almost all Notes servers went berserk.
Coming into the office the next morning, the whole helpdesk and (remaining) admin team was freaking out, desperately trying to cope with the problem - which meant copying as many databases away from the Notes servers onto network drives to make space for the indexing to do it's fatal work ... I had to go to a doctor's appointment back then and when leaving the office, I remember the picture of the helpdesk room, in which admins and helpdesk staff were seperated through a huge cabinet. On one side, one of the admins was sitting in front of a graphical diskspace overview and every one or two minutes he would shout over to helpdesk: "Move more files!".
I came back two hours later and found the exact same picture still: "Move more files!" was all that was to hear - whilst on the other side of the cabinet, helpdesk staff was hacking into their keyboards as hell to move files as fast as they could.
Trying to help, I walked down into one of the server rooms and looked at the domino console - which had a lightyear's length by now. I was hoping that load compact might help and tried to enter just that into the console, to make the Domino server kind of slow down on re-creating all indexes as well as maybe make some room by itself - however, back then, if you enterted something into the server console, it would not SHOW what you had typed further up, so typing "load compact" whilst the server waswriting to screaming for help on the console in those days looked more like this:
l
...
...
o
...
...
ad
....
...
...
c
...
...
om
...
...
pa...
...
...
...
ct
What I didn't know (I was a developer after all, so Admins forgive me, please) was that the server would still take all those loose lines AS ONE command - so I tried to be as fast as possible (I guess this was still from a trauma trying to enter a command in OS/2 before the OS had loaded the video driver a few weeks ago, where I spent about an hour to enter a command as fast as possible, too ... ;-)).
Within a few seconds I had loaded 10 compact tasks and the Notes server died (a cloud of smoke would have visualized that just fine).
Notes just rocks!
The Turtles article reminded me of "InterNotes WebPublisher" - we were sitting in an office at one of Austria's major banks (Raiffeisen, to be precise) and shouting out "Publish!" every few minutes (yep!) - every time you wanted a web page being translated to HTML (asap), you had to click on a "Publish"-button - god, that was fun!
Starting in 1992 with the ends of Notes 2 and the beginnings of Notes 3 I remember the first thing I wanted to do with/to Notes was add my own "menu form" (an entry page with buttons to create the most important documents, access views, etc.) to a database - and the colleagues, that had started a little earlier with Notes than me, looked at me and said "Never done that (in other words: wasn't possible before) - so why now?". "Soon", Navigators, Framesets, and more were to come - but after all, we were in quite the early days, when you could break everyone of your fingers with the formula language (@Explode, @Implode, @Right, @Left, @Command's at the end of everything else), and then there were flat Notes names (as opposed to hirarchical), tons of hardcoded servernames and more fun.
Sometimes in @formula coding I'm so oldschool that I forget @For and explode and implode as hell - and I also quite frequently forget to use @ThisName and @ThisValue ... *sigh*
The two funniest stories I remember from back then (apart from the Puuuhhhbbllliiiisshh-mania) are actually one:
On the evening before an admin colleague went on holiday, he wanted to kind of clean up the Domino (back then referred to as Notes servers) environment and thus created a notes.ini template which he copied to all servers (whilst maintaining server specific ini entries, unfortunately not all of them) - part of the template was also Setup=...
Now guess what happened? Quite a few of the other Notes servers had had a different value for the Setup= notes.ini entry prior to the clean-up and started to re-create ALL view indexes over night, for views that hadn't been used in quite some time - basically, almost all Notes servers went berserk.
Coming into the office the next morning, the whole helpdesk and (remaining) admin team was freaking out, desperately trying to cope with the problem - which meant copying as many databases away from the Notes servers onto network drives to make space for the indexing to do it's fatal work ... I had to go to a doctor's appointment back then and when leaving the office, I remember the picture of the helpdesk room, in which admins and helpdesk staff were seperated through a huge cabinet. On one side, one of the admins was sitting in front of a graphical diskspace overview and every one or two minutes he would shout over to helpdesk: "Move more files!".
I came back two hours later and found the exact same picture still: "Move more files!" was all that was to hear - whilst on the other side of the cabinet, helpdesk staff was hacking into their keyboards as hell to move files as fast as they could.
Trying to help, I walked down into one of the server rooms and looked at the domino console - which had a lightyear's length by now. I was hoping that load compact might help and tried to enter just that into the console, to make the Domino server kind of slow down on re-creating all indexes as well as maybe make some room by itself - however, back then, if you enterted something into the server console, it would not SHOW what you had typed further up, so typing "load compact" whilst the server was
l
...
...
o
...
...
ad
....
...
...
c
...
...
om
...
...
pa...
...
...
...
ct
What I didn't know (I was a developer after all, so Admins forgive me, please) was that the server would still take all those loose lines AS ONE command - so I tried to be as fast as possible (I guess this was still from a trauma trying to enter a command in OS/2 before the OS had loaded the video driver a few weeks ago, where I spent about an hour to enter a command as fast as possible, too ... ;-)).
Within a few seconds I had loaded 10 compact tasks and the Notes server died (a cloud of smoke would have visualized that just fine).
Notes just rocks!
Comments
Theo Heselmans, 2008-04-07 08:52
Theo Heselmans, 2008-04-07 08:57