IOPES - new version

Remember I wrote a post about me using IBM Omnifind Personal Email Search (IOPES) ? Well, I'm still using it. Could not find another alternative, this is good enough for me searching about 8000 (and counting) locally stored mails, in one archive and one mail replica. On Lotus 8.5 beta2.

As I am writing this post, I've just installed (not upgrading, which is a feature request) the latest version which you can get it from http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/emailsearch

For the new version I hope they managed to reduce the memory footprint, so that I would not stop the engine each time I run other memory hog programs.

There's also an IOPES Outlook version, and from my past experience Outlook is worse than Lotus when searching more than 5000 locally stored mails. At least, without IOPES and relying on Lotus Full-Text Index, I know I can find what I am looking for by performing two searches. One in local mail replica, the second in archive.

With Outlook, I remember I just waited for the search to return something. Anything. Ok, the keywords were bad, I want to stop the search. How do I stop a search in Outlook ? Have no idea, I will check the Help. But now I want to find something with my keywords, Outlook not responding. And waiting .... and waiting ... and waiting ... and Ctrl-Alt-Del, and kill the process ... and rebooting. Damn ! Next time I'm afraid to search anything in Outlook, maybe I need to reboot :)

That's why, at that time, I switched to Thunderbird. q.e.d. :)

websphere diagnostics starters

for those of you starting to mock with the WebSphere performance issues, start by understanding the underlying IBM JVM which is by default used in all WebSphere products. There's a 'java diagnostics guide' for each version. The same is true for SUN's virtual machine, but here's the link to the IBM's diagnostics guides:

Diagnosis Documentation

when in doubt, check the source

sorry for the absence. I've been busy. Now that I somehow managed to get into the winter holidays, though some would have argued (I really didn't knew until yesterday that I will be able to take this vacation), I have a little story to share.

It's about the source of not some genius program. And not Domino. But WebSphere. Actually, the startup script of a WebSphere. startServer.sh

I learn all the time. And I lost a day, just to figure out the difference between AIX and Linux, or between WAS5 and WAS6 (does not matter) with regard to above mentioned script.

How do I start a WAS server, named server1:

AIX / WAS6:
> pwd
/
>/usr/ibm/websphere/appserver/startServer.sh server1
starting ......

So you see, I got used to call the startup script on AIX (or WAS6) from no matter what location in the file-system.

Guess what: on a Linux customer, or perhaps because they are still using WAS5, this didn't worked :) It just happened it didn't worked when I was following a federation operation. And failed. And questions came, because it threw errors about input/output/redirection files not being there, not accessible, not having permissions. Did I do something wrong with the federation, did I not set some parameters .... what happened ? Try again, scratch the head, then again, then the day was lost.

Next day:
Environment for WAS is loaded with setupCmdLine.sh script. Errors because the environment not loaded. OK. WHY ?

Answer:
because startServer.sh needs to run on Linux from the /bin folder of WAS, so it can find the setupCmdLine.sh script

So, above sequence of starting:
Linux / WAS5:
> pwd
/
>cd /bin
>./startServer.sh server1
starting ......

And I found this only after actually looking into the startServer.sh script, just to see that it does a 'dirname' command and expects to load the WAS environment, otherwise default OS JAVA is used, which gets errors not even close to the actual problem.

So, if such a thing happens to you, check the source :)