Now that brought some memories back for me.
A few years after Bruce arranged to host openntf.org at his work, he bought a server and hosted it at PSC in 2002.
After a couple more years OpenNTF really started to attract attention and traffic spiked big time. We started to worry about up-time and data backup so I bought a Dell PowerEdge 1800 in 2006 to act as the European backup and failover server for the American based OpenNTF site.
After the production site was transferred to Prominic (where it still runs today, thanks to Justin Hill and the other guys at Prominic), it continued to act as development server for years, but today sadly it started to squeak and squirrel and after a couple of restart attempts died completely.
Not bad actually; 9 years is way over the average for a server, even for one with every fail safe option available.
Anyway, it got me thinking about the early days of OpenNTF and how simple 'development life' was back then (for me anyway).
I am working on major JEE projects with large multidisciplinar teams nowadays, a long way from the 'one person one project a week' Domino development environments I was involved in those days.
It feels like the death of the old server symbolises the ending of my involvement with the Lotus/IBM/Domino community as well. I am still involved in several Notes/Domino/Traveler/Sametime upgrades and such, but development work on that platform seems hard to find.
Some ISV's are still developing their commercial applications, but I don't see much development at the end-user level. Could be I am not in contact with the current Domino development scene anymore, but that is how i experience it.
Sad because the Domino community seemed so much more involved in the platform than the Java world. Yes there are all kinds of venues and conferences etcetera, but I do not see the same involvement as in the Lotus/Notes/Domino scene.
A sad thought at the start of the Lotusphere Connect ConnectED conference, but I'm sure it will work out eventually.
25 January 2015 comments (3)
Vince's
Ramblings.
OpenNTF backup server (2006) died