Centrelink's new website - built on Domino, very nice

Centrelink is a huge Australian government department that has been using Domino for their Website for years. They recently gave the site a facelift. Check it out.

It is most likely the highest profile, most widely hit, Domino website in Australia.

Nice work.

Using the combined power of Defrag.NSF and DDM

Defrag.NSF and DDM are both powerful tools for the Domino administrator. Here's a neat way for a Domino administrator to combine the power of these two great tools to help minimise "wasted" free space by reducing file size in targeted databases on a Domino server. You can use a DDM Database/Scheduled Checks probe to alert you when the amount of unused space in a database is beyond a configured threshold. In the pic below, files in the mail\*.* directory will be monitored for wasted space beyond 1/3 the total size of the database, this valuable disk space can be better used somewhere else on your server.



Now, you will notice there is an option just underneath where you can "Automatically compact the database", the problem with selecting this option is that you cannot specify what style of compact you want and when you have transaction logging enabled the default -b option will be used and there will be no file size reduction, that is where Defrag.NSF will come into play.

Once this DDM probe runs, any database exceeding your threshold setting will trigger the following type DDM document:



With this information we can target the database(s) in question and configure Defrag.NSF to run a Compact -B at the next scheduled maintenance run (yes, the database is small for demo purposes, but you get the point, and it also has one fragment because Defrag.NSF is maintaining this server). This will happen as scheduled without further involvement from the administrator, here are the settings before the maintenance has run.


Now Defrag.NSF will perform this maintenance and defrag the database as an integrated operation as defined by your configured Defrag.NSF schedule:


Here is the result, notice the database size and the number of fragments after the maintenance, compared to the before:



If transaction logging is enabled, best practice dictates you should backup soon after running this style of compact. (DBIID changes)

So there is a very useful way to use these two tools together and harness the power they both offer the Domino administrator, the disk savings are very impressive when this approach is used on even just a few large files with a lot of trapped space. It doesn't take very long at all to set this up and it's a nice surgical approach delivering good results compared to just running Compact on everything in sight (shotgun approach).

How to Prevent NSF fragmentation by taking "Preemptive" Action

There's an old saying, "Use the right tool for the job", and the job I'd like to discuss is adding free space to a Domino database that has been freshly defragged and in a contiguous state on disk. Adding free space to a freshly defragmented .nsf file is a smart and "Preemptive" way to help stave off further fragmentation of that file when new data needs to be written into it.

What you are doing in effect is "reserving" a place for that new data so that it will be written along side the existing data in a contiguous state and not written somewhere else on the disk that will require split I/O every time it needs to be accessed, and again when it is time to back that data up.

The right tool for the job in this case is Defrag.NSF, using the option to "Monitor Free Space". When the administrator selects this option and configures the free space desired for that particular database, Defrag.NSF will monitor that setting for the database and make sure that amount of space is always available for new data to be written. This happens during the automatic defrag maintenance schedule and if this setting is sufficient your nsf files will never fragment again.

The beauty of Defrag.NSF is that this setting will be continuously monitored, and any fragmentation that does occur due to data "overflow" will be promptly and automatically dealt with at the next scheduled Defrag.NSF maintenance run, along with the fresh allocation of the free space.

For more information check out our website at www.preemptive.com.au

Here is an example of a Database settings document

Getting Lotus Knows to Australia

Apparently the Lotus Knows campaign running in America is doing wonders for Lotus in the USA. We're also told there is going to be a World Wide roll out and Germany is next. But who is next after that ?

To help push ANZ up the list, what I'd like to suggest is that any Business partner or Customer in Australia takes 5 minutes and writes an email to "Glen Boreham" the Managing Director of IBM Australia and New Zealand and asks in the nicest possible way that he requests Lotus Knows and supports this as a local campaign.

The IBM website tells me that Mr Boreham's email address is glenb@au1.ibm.com

Asking can't hurt, just make sure you do it in a nice and pleasant way.

Anyone know how to force an ID into the ID Vault ?

Rather than wait hours or days for it to happen. Is there anyway to make it happen straight away for a user ?

Just let me know. I will post details if we work it out.