Lotus Protector – the first hickup (1/16/2010)

This is going to be a real quick one, since it is just a day before Lotusphere® and I actually have other things to do than to fiddle with Lotus Protector and blog about it – but if I don’t write it down now, I will forget about it soon.

Today I had my first hick-up with Lotus Protector. We had a power outage this morning and it lasted longer than my UPS system was able to keep the servers up and running. I was out of the house and could not bring the servers down gracefully so I had a hard crash of the VMWare server that hosts LP. It came back up but for some reason something was not initializing correctly. It would not start the http stack so I could not connect to the admin interface and logging in via the console took me into the setup routine (passwords, host name, ip address, etc.)  but would never let me go to the actual prompt after that so I could have a look at the guts of the beast and figure out what is causing the indigestion.

Being that this is the day before I am leaving for LS10 and I have zero time to waste, I simply went back to a VMWare snap shot I had taken and restarted the instance …and voila, there she goes. The system downloaded the latest spam and AV definitions in about 3 minutes, updated it’s time and date and I received my first mails within 2 minutes of the system starting.

Now, this is impressive, though I regret not having the time to spend on dissecting the server, looking into log files etc. to find out exactly what was wrong and fix the actual issue. I am not hoping that this happens again, but if it does, I hope I can find the time to spend on trouble-shooting.

In any case, having a snapshot of a clean setup is a great was to go and restore in the case of a catastrophic failure. As long as you update that snapshot after any configuration change, you should be alright.

See y’all at Lotusphere!!!