My (short) trip to Admin2007

Note to self:Admin2007 is more training then it is a conference.
You see, I am allowed to attend only one conference a year and I haven't yet been able to break myself free of wanting to go to Lotusphere in January. I mean come on, it's Orlando in January. I live in Ohio. It's cold and snowy here in January, you get the picture. Okay that and the fact that it's Lotusphere. But I was able to work it out that I could attend the jumpstart "Sametime 7.5.x Deployment and Upgrade, Without the Aspirin" on Sunday. And I am really glad I did. Chris Miller gave a fantastic training session with a lot of VERY helpful information that made me rethink how I have Sametime configured in my environment. I'm just really bummed that I had to leave early so I could catch my flight home. It of course ended up that Boston was on a two-hour delay due to weather, so I could have stayed for the whole thing. Oh well. Hopefully I will get to attend next year. I really do think that it will be worth it.

But that wasn't all that happened this weekend in Boston. I was able to leave on Saturday morning and take my wife with me! Early flight out of Akron/Canton and we were checked into the hotel before 9! From there we were able to take the train up to Salem and roam around that witchy town for a couple of hours. It is really a pretty town, I just wish the weather had been a bit cooler and less humid for the hike around town. Next time, I am going to rent a car. Easier on the feet ;) We did a few of the attractions that talked about the witch trials and the towns history. Saturday night, we made our way back down to Boston, had a really good dinner at an Irish pub at Quincy Market and then staggered back to the hotel to pass out while watching the Cavs game. On Sunday, Denise, being the trooper that she is, hung out in the lobby of the Sheraton while I was in the session. She is the best.

Well, back to the grind.

LDAP lunacy and other stuff

LDAP is a fantastic tool to use, especially when you are using it with an anti-spam solution to validate email addresses on inbound mail. It is a great solution until something goes wrong. In my case, my Domino Directory had gotten corrupted and that made for a fun afternoon.

It all started when my application server began to become unresponsive during the late morning hours. That also happens to be the server that I do the LDAP lookups against. So, I rebooted the server and didn't think much more about it until shortly after the restart and I checked to make sure that LDAP lookups were being completed properly. All of a sudden, any time an address was being requested, it would find the entry in the Domino Directory but return to the spam server that it was not a valid address which then caused all messages coming in at the time to be rejected. Not a good thing. So I killed LDAP lookups against Domino and started the process of trying to figure out what went wrong. I started by calling the spam vendor and they couldn't find anything wrong, which led me to call Domino support. After doing a bunch of different debugging, the tech found the problem. Something had gone missing from my anonymous LDAP lookup entry in the all servers configuration document.
So for giggles, I did a design refresh on my Domino Directory and noticed that several items were being added. I even saw LDAP flash by a couple of times on the lower bar. That led me to think that somehow my Domino Directory had gotten corrupt and I somehow lost my configuration for LDAP. After re-adding the objectClass attribute type, LDAP started working again. I always seem to get the weird ones.

Outside of that and complaining about paying $3.50 for a gallon of gas, not too much else happening in my world. This past Sunday we had a great time helping Shannon celebrate her 17th anniversary of her 21st birthday. The NEOLUG meeting takes place tomorrow at IBM in Cleveland. Denise and I are all set to fly off to Boston a week from Saturday so I can attend the jumpstart training at Admin2007. Which leads me to one complaint I have with this conference. A few days after finalizing all our plans for the trip, Clippings sends this email. It would have been nice to have gotten that a few days earlier then I could have gotten away with having another day in Boston. Harrumph!

Well, that's it for now. I'll only be attending the Sunday jumpstarts in Boston, so if you see a big guy wearing this tshirt that looks like this:
Say hi!

Admin2007 news

Good news: I get to go to the Sunday jumpstart sessions. Really wanted to attend the Sametime one in the afternoon and I got approval to fly in for that. Could go for the whole thing but if I do, I have to give up going to Lotusphere 2008 and I'm not ready to give that up.
Bad news: There are no rooms at the Sheraton for Saturday night. Harrumph!

I'm sure I'll figure something out. Plus, since Airtran has cheap direct flights out of Akron-Canton, I get to take the wife! So if you see the two of us running around doing the sight-seeing thing on Saturday, be sure to say hi!