It is really difficult to pinpoint one particular feature of the IBM Lotus Foundations Start server as the “killer app”.  Lotus Foundations comes with so many handy, crucial SMB tools and each and every one of them is important.  However, if I was forced to choose one feature I would probably have to choose backups.

You’re only as safe as your most recent, reliable backup.  Without a proper backup, you could find yourself spending hours re-inputting data, recreating a spreadsheet, updating your address book, etc…  We all know how important backups are, but it is often the last thing on our laundry list of business to dos.  And, even if you did regularly take backups, what is the probability that the backup was a reliable one?  How often do you really do test restores to make sure that what you backed up is actually intact?

What about disaster recovery?  Have you planned for the worst case scenario?  Sure, you’re performing backups, but are you making sure that recent backups are also being taken off-site to another location for disaster recovery purposes?  If you are, how recent are those off-site backups?

Sure, you could use an online backup service for disaster recovery.  However, that can become expensive as you amass more files and data.  If you wanted to restore from an online backup, it will take as long as the download speed of your Internet connection.  For gigabytes of data, a full restore could take hours or days.

The Lotus Foundations Start server appliance has integrated IBM’s Intelligent Disk Backup (IDB) technology into its backup toolbox.  IDB allows you to perform incremental backups as often as 15 minutes.   You can backup daily, weekly, or as often as you need to.  If you are backing up frequently, IDB also makes “incremental” copies of recently modified files.  So, if you modified a file an hour ago and the same file two hours ago, you are able to restore either file to your system with the click of a button.  This is very useful if you realize that the file you saved an hour ago was somehow corrupted or you erased important information from it right before saving it.

In addition, the backups are encrypted.  So, even if the backup drive were to fall into the wrong hands, the data is secure.

Finally, what happens if your main hard drive fails?  Well, you just push a button and all of the server configuration and software is restored in minutes.  No need to reinstall the operating system, re-configure your software, or re-assign rights to folders and printers.  The IDB  backs everything up, not just your data files.

What about disaster recovery?  If you buy additional IDB drive cartridges with the server, you merely need to pull out one cartridge at the end of the day on Friday, plug in your other cartridge and take the first cartridge home with you so the data is off-site.  The act of plugging in a new cartridge tells Lotus Foundations to start backing up the whole system from scratch automatically.  No need to let the IDB know about the new cartridge.  It is all taken care of automatically.

If the unthinkable happens, and your server at the office were to be lost in a calamity, you would only need to buy a new IBM server, plug in the cartridge that you took home with you, push a button and you’re right back where you started, since your last backup.

So, yes, IBM’s Intelligent Disk Backup technology that comes with the IBM Lotus Foundations Start server appliance is the bomb.  Finally, no more tapes, no more carrying around an external USB drive from PC to PC, and no more worrying about disaster recovery.  And best of all, no more shelling out monthly fees to continue making online backups.  Let the IDB take care of the backups for you so you can just sit back, relax and focus on work.

We’ve begun selling and explaining the IBM Lotus Foundations Start (LFS) server software appliance to existing and potential customers.  I show them a side-by-side comparison chart with a competing small business solution so that they can compare apples-to-apples.  After a short explanation, I’ve gotten comments such as:

- “This sounds too good to be true”

- “Why would I not choose Lotus Foundations?”

However, customers still show hesitation because the underlying operating system is Linux and there is concern regarding interoperability with Windows.  Of course, we know that we can load a virtual environment with Windows on it, but that is not the same as having the whole appliance running Windows.  This is not a show stopper by any means.  Customers are wowed (as I stated above) by all that LFS can do and they are pleased that they are now afforded a choice in the SMB market.  At the same time, LFS is a significant upfront investment for smaller businesses, so they want to vet this new opportunity before taking the leap.

I’m confident that LFS can hold its own as it really is not “too good to be true”.  It is truly a great solution that, not only offer SMBs a stable and reliable alternative,  but, also, I believe will allow SMBs to streamline their IT infrastructure while also allowing them to spend more time focusing on their core business.

At one of our client sites, we experienced a strange behaviour where incoming emails were being rejected for policy reasons and outgoing emails were not being delivered.

04/15/2009 01:34:40 PM  Router: Failed to connect to SMTP host HOST.SOMEDOMAIN.COM because The server is not responding. The server may be down or you may be experiencing network problems. Contact your system administrator if this problem persists.

Or something like this : Mail from user@somedomain.com rejected for policy reasons. Domain not found in DNS.

The quick solution was to have “tell router update config” command run every 30 minutes (less is better) so that domino can flush its DNS record that have been cached. Strange behaviour as we have to do it often.

Here is the screen shot

**Update 4/20/2009**

We requested a PMR from IBM and it may turn out that there could be a problem in the Domino code itself. The support engineer has escalated this issue for a possible hotfix. We experienced this issue using Domino 8.0.2 FP1 plus another server that runs on Linux with Domino 8.5 has also had a similar problem, but mails for some reason get delivered after a couple of seconds on the 8.5 server.

IBM has provided us with a hotfix to solve the problem where Domino server caches an A record until 2043 when an MX record is not found during DNS query or when there is an error. In case you are interested, the hotfix number is 287 (02FP1HF287) but I believe you have to get it by calling in to IBM support. Here is a quote from the support engineer :

It sets a default TTL for DNS that router uses in its cache to 30 minutes when an error occurs or when a non-MX record is returned.

This default is adjustable by the INI RouterDNSErrorTTL. The INI expects seconds so a value of 3600 would be 1 hour. I would not recommend adjusting the TTL unless needed so do not use the INI unless there is a reason.

 To get more detail on your log and to see whether it caches certain A record until year 2043, increase the debug output level by entering the following into the Domino console:

start consolelog
set config debug_threadid=1          (0 to disable)
set config debugrouter=3                 (0 to disable)
set config log_mailrouting=40       (20 to disable)
set config smtpclientdebug=3        (0 to disable)
restart task router