Agileview

Andreas Pleschek, from IBM in Stuttgart, Germany, heads open source and Linux technical sales across North East Europe for IBM. Andreas was presenting at the Linux Forum 2006.

At the end of the presentation, Andreas Pleschek revealed that the laptop he used for the presentation was running a pre-release of their new platform, the Open Client. It is actually a Red Hat work station with IBM’s new Workplace Client, which is built in Java on top of Eclipse. Because of Eclipse, it runs on both Linux and Windows, and they have been able to reuse the C++ code in Lotus Notes for Windows to run it natively on Linux via Eclipse. Internally in IBM, for years, they have had a need to run Lotus Notes on Linux, and now they can. And they will offer it to their customers.

Workplace uses Lotus Notes for mail, calendar, etc. and Firefox as their browser. For an office suite, they use OpenOffice.org.

Andreas Pleschek also told that IBM has cancelled their contract with Microsoft as of October this year. That means that IBM will not use Windows Vista for their desktops. Beginning from July, IBM employees will begin using IBM Workplace on their new, Red Hat-based platform. Not all at once - some will keep using their present Windows versions for a while. But none will upgrade to Vista.

What can I say, This is *very good news* for Linux, Open Source advocates, Open Office and of course, Lotus Workplace. Way to go!

More information from Groklaw.net.

Via The OpenOffice Blog.

We’ve decided to try out IBM’s Workplace Services Express at Agileware as it looks like promising technology. We will be documenting our experiences about installing and running a Workplace Services Express server from scratch (real go to whoa style), in series of blog entries on the Agileview.

In part 1 of this series, discussed buying and building our custom server and installing Suse Linux Enterprise Server 8.0.

Installing Workplace Services Express on Suse Linux Enterprise Server 8.0
In this entry, we discuss installing Workplace Services Express v2.0 on our new Suse Linux Enterprise Server 8.0 (dev.agileware.net) and our initial experiences using Workplace Services Express.

Where Do You Get Workplace Services Express?
Before we start, let me just quickly point out that if you’re an existing IBM Passport Advantage customer then you are entitled to, at no charge, a 20 user pack of Workplace Services Express. This is a limited offer which expires on September 15, 2005. So if you have not registered already, then probably a good idea to do so, now. More details available here @ Walnut.

Installing Workplace Services Express on dev.agileware.net
The moment of truth! Installing Workplace Services Express on dev.agileware.net.

1. Log into dev.agileware.net.
2. Launch a XWindows session.
3. Insert the Workplace Services Express DVD (thanks to Kathy Staples @ IBM for providing that).
4. Copy the install files to /opt/wse, about 2.65 GB of data in total. This takes about 10 minutes.
5. Unpack the compressed install files. tar zxvf [insert filename].taz. This takes about 20 minutes.
6. Run the ./install.sh file.
7. A installation Wizard window then appears and prompts for license agreement, administrator login/password, server name, installation directory and click finish to continue and install Workplace Services Express.
8. Installation process commences. This takes about 25 minutes.
   
9. At the completion of the installation, the Wizard allows you to start the Workplace Services Express.
   
   
10. Click next and Workplace Services Express starts up. After 2 minutes of waiting, I start to get worried. It seems to be taking a very long time to startup. Thinking that maybe Workplace Services Express is trying to use Port 80 & 25, I shutdown Apache and PostFix. No change. Sitting firmly on my hands (and not rebooting), I give Workplace Services Express the time it needs to start up - 5 minutes.
11. Once the startup has completed, the Wizard displays a link to the portal.
    
    
12. Click on the link and hey presto, there’s Workplace Services Express! Enter the Administrator login/password and we’re in.
    
    
13. The Workplace Services Express interface starts to assemble itself on the page. Very nice.
    
    

Playing With Workplace Services Express
Now the fun really begins, play time…. But I won’t go into too much detail here, I’ll save that for another blog series. Anyway, here’s some initial comments.

Logging in as the administrator (wps admin) and navigating around Workplace Services Express, the interface is very professional, intuitive and most importantly consistent. So I do not expect new and infrequent users will have any trouble learning the product.

I thought that the default Port 9081 was an odd choice. Why not just use Port 80? But considering the audience for this product would be primarily Intranet based, I guess it does no harm. If this product were Internet based then there may be problems for some users behind any port blocking firewalls. Anyway, I assume it’s a simple matter to change the default Port in the system configuration.

I stopped & disabled all of the other running services and checked top. The total memory usage for the Linux server (running only core services) and Workplace Services Express was consistently 1.5GB to 1.9GB, as shown in the top screenshot. Much to my surprise the Linux swap was not even touched, so it’s all working from the allocated 2GB of memory. In general, CPU usage was not particularly high - so our AMD64 3200 is coping well with the load and there was no I/O wait meaning the hard disks were not thrashing either (with no swap being used this makes sense). So it looks like the recommended hardware specifications provided by IBM were correct, 2GB RAM minimum, 4GB RAM recommended for production. My gut feeling is that Workplace Services Express would take full use of 4GB RAM in a production environment.

For example: When creating a new Team Space in Workplace Services Express and monitoring load using top shows a load average ranging between 1 and 1.9, with 5 or more java threads executing with RSS (total memory allocation for the process) 730mb of memory.

When using Workplace Services Express for the first time, performance is OK. I know the topic of “performance” has been mentioned by a few other bloggers and I’ve also seen it first hand before when Kathy Staples presented Workplace Services Express @ Walnut. So I won’t harp on this fact too much. All the initial navigation and actions are slow, so I suspect there’s some on-demand compiling, execution and caching happening in the background. After there’s a few users accessing Workplace Services Express for a little while, performance definitely improves and Workplace Services Express delivers very acceptable response times for most page requests (<2 seconds). So the more you use it the faster it gets

We let Workplace Services Express run all day & night and played again the following day. We registered a few test users and did the things that users normally would do: created new pages, added Portlets and used the Document Manager and Team Space (and tried to break things). Overall performance had improved noticeably since the initial install. So maybe there’s a burn-in period required

Occassionally the following error was displayed on a few pages (was not consistent) and refreshing the page usually solved the problem: 408 Connection timed out while reading request. Not sure what’s going on there.

Noticed that there was a RSS Portlet available too, so I tried to set that up with my favourite RSS feeds… but it seems to be hard-coded to some specific RSS providers, which I thought was kind of odd. Posted a question to the Workplace Services Express Dicussion Forum @ developWorks, and I’ve already received a few responses - fantastic!.

I experienced some random crashes and memory leaks when using either Internet Explorer 6 and Fire Fox 1 on a PC workstation which had been recently upgraded to Java 5. On other workstations using Java 1.4 there was no problem. So there may be some incompatibility between Workplace Services Express applets and Java 5 - beware of that little trap.

Starting & Stopping And Setting Workplace Services Express To Automatically Start On Linux
Now that Workplace Services Express has installed, I decide to see if any auto-startup scripts were installed and so reboot dev.agileware.net. dev.agileware.net reboots and it appears that Workplace Services Express does not start. Bugger.

A quick look at the /opt/ibm/WorkplaceServicesExpress directory reveals two very important files.
startWorkplaceServices.sh
stopWorkplaceServices.sh

Calling startWorkplaceServices.sh will startup Workplace Services Express. Whereas, stopWorkplaceServices.sh will shutdown Workplace Services Express. That’s fairly self evident

So to start Workplace Services Express automatically on startup:

1. Michael created this workPlaceServices startup script
2. Copied to /etc/init.d/
3. Ran the command chkconfig --add workPlaceServices. Must run this command from within the /etc/init.d/ directory.

Now we can start Workplace Services Express by simply issuing the command, /etc/init.d/workPlaceServices start. And stop Workplace Services Express by simply issuing the command, /etc/init.d/workPlaceServices stop. Workplace Services Express will now automatically startup when ever dev.agileware.net boots up.

The system startup time seems to be a consistent 5 minutes before Workplace Services Express is initialised and ready for action. I expect with future versions this time will be reduced.

Closing Thoughts
Installation of Workplace Services Express is a no-brainer. No one should have any problems doing a default install and getting the product up and running. Configuration and integration with other systems (eg. Domino, LDAP, Exchange, MySQL etc) will of course, take longer and is highly dependent on those systems. I was really expecting to have to read the Release Notes, Installation Guide and possibly a Red Book, and then have to start editing the various configuration files, but this is clearly not the case. The default install is point-click-run. IBM definitely got things right here, well done guys!

Out of the box, Workplace Services Express is a very feature rich application. If you compare it to a default Lotus Notes/Domino install where you really only get Mail, C&S out of the box then Workplace Services Express is a much more user friendly and ready-to-use experience. Workplace Services Express has 112 ready-to-go Portlets, that is simply amazing.

It is very easy to configure a customer Portlet and display that on your Workplace. I even tried to configure the Mail & Calendar Portlet for our internal Domino Server but got stuck. However, the vibe of it is definitely there

We certainly look forward to exploring in more depth the Portlets and capabilities of this product in the near future.

Might be time to go read the release notes now for Workplace Services Express, as suggested by the Workplace Channel Bloggers….

Other Resources & Links

• Download Michael’s Linux startup script for Workplace Services Express
• Workplace Services Express Dicussion Forum @ developWorks - A discussion forum for the server-managed, role-based collaborative platform Workplace Services Express.
• The Workplace Channel - an unofficial blog for IBM Business Partners in Australia and New Zealand, about technology and happenings in the world of IBM Workplace software

We’ve decided to try out IBM’s Workplace Services Express at Agileware as it looks like promising technology. We will be documenting our experiences about installing and running a Workplace Services Express server from scratch (real go to whoa style), in series of blog entries on the Agileview.

In Part 2 of the series, we discuss installing Workplace Services Express v2.0 on our new Suse Linux Enterprise Server 8.0 (dev.agileware.net) and our initial experiences using Workplace Services Express.

Part 1, Buying And Building The Server Hardware
In this entry, we discuss buying and building the required server hardware components, since we do not currently have any spare hardware that meet the minimum requirements (and it’s a lot of fun shopping & building your own hardware!).

The documented hardware requirements for Workplace Services Express are:

• Processor: CPU speeds of late-model, mid-range to high-end servers are recommended. Pentium 4 processor at 2.0GHz or equivalent at a minimum.
• Physical memory: 2 GB at a minimum per processor; 4 GB per processor recommended for production environments.
• Disk space: 17 GB at a minimum.

From Workplace Services Express InfoCenter via the excellent Workplace Channel Blog.

We have a pseudo policy at Agileware that all CPU’s must be AMD64 based, so from the start we are going to diverge slightly from the requirement for an Intel CPU. The simple reason is that in our view AMD64 outperforms cost-equivalent Intel CPU’s for server applications.

So let’s build the hardware shopping list. Firstly I can highly recommend AusPC Market for all components, they provide excellent service, deliver next business day and are very price-competitive.

I have excluded the hard disk and DVD drive from the shopping list, as we currently have a few spare Western Digital 80Gb’s (”JB” 7200 RPM ATA/100 IDE Hard Drive, 8mb cache) and a LiteOn DVD+RW which we will use for the new server.

Option 1: The Dual AMD Opteron, 4GB RAM
Using server grade, quality hardware we can assemble a dual Opteron 244 with 4GB RAM for just over $AUD 3,200, which exceeds the minimum hardware requirements for Workplace Services Express.

• 2 x AMD Opteron 244 1.8GHz 64-Bit CPU, 1mb L2 w/AMD fan/heatsink - $AUD 748.00
• 4 x PC-2700 1024mb 184-pin DDR REGISTERED ECC (Corsair 166/333mhz) for servers - $AUD 1,460.80
• 1 x Tyan Thunder K8S Pro Dual Opteron board, w/8x DDR, 8Mb ATI video, 3x LAN, 4x 64-bit PCI-X, 2x PCI, SATA/RAID - $AUD 698.50
• 1 x Antec 550W TruePower EPS12v 24-pin Power Supply, suits Tyan Opteron or Xeon boards, 2-fan - $AUD 180
• 1 x Antec Plusview 1000AMG ATX tall-tower case, no PSU, metallic grey with side window - $AUD 132
• Total cost: $AUD 3,219.30

Option 2: The AMD64 3200, 4GB RAM
Using the latest desktop hardware we can assemble a AMD64 3200 with 4GB RAM for just over $AUD 2,300, which again exceeds the minimum hardware requirements for Workplace Services Express.

• 2 x PC-3200 2048MB GeIL 184-pin DDR SDRAM w/blue heatspreader, CAS 3, 2x 1024mb sticks $AUD 1320.00
• 1 x Gigabyte K8NF-9 Skt939 nForce4 board, PCI-x16, 4x DDR, 2x PCI-x1, 3x PCI, SATA/RAID, LAN, Audio $AUD 209.00
• 1 x ABIT Radeon RX300SE-GURU 128MB PCI-X16 video card, 128-bit with DVI, VGA, TV-Out $AUD 148.50
• 1 x AMD Athlon64 3200+ (2.0GHz) 64-Bit CPU, 90nm Socket939 w/AMD fan-heatsink, 540K cache $AUD 324.50
• 1 x Antec 550W TruePower EPS12v 24-pin Power Supply, suits Tyan Opteron or Xeon boards, 2-fan - $AUD 180
• 1 x CoolerMaster Cavalier 3 Case, Black - $152 (from PC Case Gear, as AusPC Market did not have this item in stock)
• Total cost: $AUD 2,334.00

Decision Time
It’s decision time, do we go dual AMD Opteron or single AMD64? The key objective of this entire exercise is to build a Workplace Services Express server for internal trial, internal development and customer demonstrations only. It does not need to be a production-ready server. So to keep the initial costs down, we select option 2, the single AMD64 with 4GB RAM.

Motherboard Problems
After placing the order with AusPC Market they quickly inform us that even though the Gigabyte K8NF-9 motherboard can take 4GB RAM it will only use 3.4GB. I ask them to verify this, so they offer to build the server and install Windows 2003. Later that afternoon they report back that only 3.4GB is available. Bugger. I sent off a few emails to Gigabyte in Taiwan and they agreed, 4GB is not achievable using the Gigabyte K8NF-9 motherboard. Bugger bugger.

Change Of Plan
Continuing with option 2, we reduce the memory from 4GB to 2GB and place the order, the revised total cost is now $AUD 1674.00. 4GB definitely would have been nice to have, but in this case is hard to justify for the extra cost.

Putting It All Together
Michael put all the bits together in about 2hrs with the end result being that it powered-on without going *fizzle*. I took some work-in-progress photos…

Most of the bits assembled within the case

Working out how to plug all those fiddly motherboard connectors

Tying down the mass of cables (which are blocking the fans)

Installing The Operating System
One of the following operating systems is required on the server where Lotus Workplace Services Express will be installed:

• RedHat Enterprise Linux Server 2.1 for Intel (x86), update 3
• SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for Intel (x86) 8 2.4 Kernel
• Microsoft Windows 2003 Enterprise
• Microsoft Windows 2003 Standard
• Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server SP4
• Microsoft Windows 2000 Server SP4

Again, from Workplace Services Express InfoCenter via the excellent Workplace Channel Blog.

Being a strong Linux advocate, we downloaded Suse Linux Enterprise Server 8.0 from Novell, copied that to a DVD and installed that onto the Workplace Services Express server. It took less than 1 hr to perform a complete install and only required a single reboot. Nothing much to report here, it was a simple process and Suse automatically detected all most of the hardware devices.

Because we are using the latest Nvidia NForce4 chipset, we downloaded and installed the NForce drivers and hey presto, everything works. Still, ya gotta love that Suse

We were both pleasantly surprised to see that one of the Suse installation banners proudly proclaimed support for Lotus Domino, cool.

Coming Up Next
In Part 2 of the series, we discuss installing Workplace Services Express v2.0 on our new Suse Linux Enterprise Server 8.0 (dev.agileware.net) and our initial experiences using Workplace Services Express.