FolderShare: Daten-Synchronisation zwischen verschiedenen Rechnern über das Internet

vowe erwähnte neulich in einem Beitrag, dass er Microsofts Service “Foldershare” dazu benutzt, die Dateiablagestrukturen seiner diversen Endgeräte zu synchronisieren.

Bisher nutzte ich dafür das Programm “Allway Sync“, was aber den Nachteil hat, dass beide Rechner in meinem lokalen Netzwerk stehen müssen. Wenn ich unterwegs bin, kann ich erst synchronisieren, wenn ich wieder zuhause bin und muss dazu noch den Laptop wieder extra hochfahren.

Mittel “Foldershare” erfolgt die Synchronisation über das Internet, d.h. es wird auch von unterwegs (wo ich ja sowieso fast immer online bin) mit dem heimischen Rechner synchronisiert.

Die Server von Microsoft dienen dabei nur der Verbindungsaufnahme und Steuerung, der eigentliche Datenaustausch erfolgt verschlüsselt als Peer2Peer-Filetransfer direkt zwischen den Rechnern. Das funktioniert auch recht gut, wenn beide Rechner hinter einer Firewall hängen.

Wenn ich nun abends nach Hause komme, sind alle meine Daten die tagsüber so erstellt bzw. geändert wurden, bereits schon auf meinem Desktop vorhanden (und werden in der nächtlichen Datensicherung auch mitgesichert…). Wenn ich Änderungen mache, werden diese morgens, sobald der Laptop online ist, wieder synchronisiert.

Zusätzlich besteht die Möglichkeit, per Webbrowser auf die Daten der Geräte zuzugreifen (hierzu muss aber mindestens ein Port von draußen nach drinnen in der Firewall geöffnet sein).

Funktioniert bisher sehr gut und es kostet nix ….

Stoiber wird neuer Bundespräsident

… zumindest wenn es nach einigen CSU-Politikern geht. Der Spiegel schreibt:

Neue Karriereaussichten für Edmund Stoiber: Mehrere CSU-Politiker haben den scheidenden bayerischen Ministerpräsidenten als möglichen Nachfolger für Bundespräsident Horst Köhler ins Gespräch gebracht. Stoiber sei als “Anwalt des kleinen Mannes” genau der Richtige für den Posten.

Nun der Mann hat auf jeden Fall seine Qualitäten, wenn es darum geht unseren Staat zu repräsentieren, wie man hier leicht erkennen kann.

Da in Bayern noch Sommerferien sind, besteht eine gewisse hoffnung, dass es sich noch um das Sommerloch handelt.

Lotus Notes Viewer not working with German client

The embedded Lotus Notes viewer was not working on some customer workstations although all necessary files were correctly installed and the KEYVIEW.INI had the correct Notes program path configured.

After some investigation we found out that a German Notes client installation does have a second KEYVIEW.INI besides the one in the Notes directory. It is stored in ..\NOTES\MUI\DE\ and must also have the correct path of the Notes program directory configured. After we corrected the path name the viewers were ok again.

I was not aware of this speciality of the German client (I suppose the same is true for other languages than English).

Draft Redbook: IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8 Deployment Guide

Still a very early draft (planned publish date: 28. September 2007) but it already might be useful for someone, the IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8 Deployment Guide:

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Planning the Notes and Domino 8 Deployment
Chapter 3. Deploying Lotus Domino 8 server
Chapter 4. Deploying the Notes 8 Client
Chapter 5. Coexistence: Domino/Domino and Domino/Microsoft Exchange
Chapter 6. Lotus Notes 8 Client Features
Chapter 7. Productivity Tools
Chapter 8. Domino Web Access
Chapter 9. New Administration Features
Chapter 10. New Concepts in Administration: Eclipse, Composite Applications and Provisioning
Chapter 11. IBM WebSphere Portal Integration
Chapter 12. New Application Development Features
Appendix A. Considerations for upgrading from Notes and Domino 6.5.x to 8
Appendix B. Lotus Notes and Domino Client Feature Comparison
Appendix C. Additional material

Lotus Sametime: Error “Cookies not enabled” with Internet Explorer

If you try to access a Lotus Sametime server with Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher you get the error message “Cookies not enabled” although you are sure that cookies ARE enabled for this host.

The reason for that is an underscore (“_”) in the host name of the Sametime server. The problem is already documented some time ago but I was not aware of this and had a hard time to find this out ….

I am quite sure that somewhere you also get a warning when installing/configuring a server with an underscore in the host name but I did ignore it 🙁 So although there seems no obvious problem with such a name you better should take care of it because of unwanted side effects later.

This btw. is no problem of IBM or Microsoft but it is not supported according to RfC 952.

Deploying IBM Lotus Connections: Planning and architecture considerations

Stephen Hardison has just published part 1 of a six-part series about “Deploying IBM Lotus Connections“.

In part 1 he writes about the most common steps to prepare for an IBM Lotus Connections deployment and the architectural concepts of a Lotus Connections installation.

Update: Now also available

Part 2: “Post-installation tuning”
Part 3: “Maintenance”
Part 4: Troubleshooting

Lotus Quickr: “My Places” does not show all places

On a customer installation we did had the problem that the users could not see all of the places they had access to in the “My Places” view.

Some of the places appeared and some others did not. We could not find any things in common for the places which were visible. The only thing we saw was that none of the newly created places were displayed.

[More:]

We then de-registered all places and registered them once again. This made it even worse as none of the places were visible now.

It took us a long time to find out what the reason for that behaviour was.

The customer changed the DNS name of the Quickr server some time after the installation from “SERVERNAME.domain.com” to “servername.domain.com”. The name was changed also in the Domino server document.

But Quickr stores the server name also in the database “PlaceCatalog.nsf” in the root of Domino data (you can see the servers known to Quickr in this database in the view “Place Servers”). In this database the server name was still listed with capital letters. As the place names do have a connection to the server name, Quickr did only found a match for places created as the server name still had capital letters in its name. All newly created places (which got the server name in small letters) were not be recognized as places for this server.

After de-registering and registering all places they were connected to the current server name (in small letters). So none of the places did match with the old server name in capital letters which was still listed in the PlaceCatalog.nsf.

After changing the field in PlacesCatalog.nsf and restarting the HTTP task all places were displayed again with no problem.

Instead of manually changing the server one could also de-register the server and register it again (although you will then get a second entry in the “Place Servers” view).