DomBlog.de - Notes, Domino and Stuff :: Today we saved about 6000 times 12 MB which is about 60.000 € savings in emc² space.

Tags: DominoInfrastructure

I am currently working at a customer site dealing with a citrix metaframe farm hosting about 6000 notesusers. This is a centrally managed environment for users all over europe and asia. The smart customer guys customized the notes 6 client at the terminal servers to support 12 languages, just by merging all language specific \mui subdirectories and modifying the mui.dat. But there was one big issue left. The language specific help files....

The multilingual features introduced in Release 6 are neat, but the client finds its help by searching for the file help\help65_client.nsf locally and if not available at its homeserver. This is bad because there is no way to support serverside helpfiles in more than one language /homeserver. So if you host 12 languages on a single homeserver you have to distribute the mailfiles locally to the clients data directory. Which is in fact bad if you have a terminalserver (homedrive) environment. It means each user has to have 12 MB of helpfile in his homedrive. So how to get rid of that?
At first we thought about dblinks in the user homdrives pointing to fileserver based helpfiles. You know this wont work.
Then we thought about something like a redirection database residing on the homeserver with the name help65_client.nsf, containing a postopen script which discovers the users Userinterface from notes.ini and opens the corresponding helpfile at the server. Good idea, but the context based help would not work and we had no idea how to close the redirector database window automatically after the real helpfile is launched and in focus.

So i sametime-discussed with Hans-Peter@office and Jens@othercustomer and both of them tried to dblink-alize me, against my arguments pointed above ..... at some point of discussion Jens asked me "how about using <servername!!filename> in the db link, does that work?". I never did it before and the database open dialog in the client doesnt show the linked db but pushing <F1> works really nice. We have all we need with this simple trick.The remaining work is to distribute the right links into the right homedirectories but we will manage that.

so thanks to my sparring partners and thanks to the people who invented instant messaging.....

Comments

1 - interesting!

Posted by jonvon At 15:53:01 On 02.03.2005 | - Website - |

2 - I can confirm that this trick works for databases and templates. Just be sure that your client can resolve the server name at the very first start of the client if you link to ALL templates.

Posted by Christian Brandlehner At 07:01:20 On 05.03.2005 | - Website - |