ADSMConnect for Notes on WIN NT

Tammy R. Kilgore
Barnett Bank, NA
904-464-6405
SUBJECT: ADSMConnect for Notes on WIN NT

Julie,

We are just completing an evaluation of the "try/buy" ADSMConnect Agent
for Lotus Notes on NT.  We had some of the same questions you did,
and here is what we found out from ADSM support:

1. Yes, the DSM.LOG does grow continuously.  I was told by a developer
   that they are going to try to incorporate some type of pruning
   capability in a future release.  For the time being, you will have
   to write some type of script to make a copy of the DSM.LOG, delete
   the DSM.LOG so it gets recreated, and then delete the older versions
   of your backups every "x" days.
2. I was told by ADSM support that the "LOAD DSMNOTES" command as it
   relates to open Notes databases only applies to the ADSMconnect
   Agent for Lotus Notes on AIX, not NT.  We are using the ADSM
   Backup/Archive Client scheduler to exectute our ADSMConnect
   Agent backups by executing a "action=command", objects="dsmnotes
   incr * -adsmpw=xxxx".  Our Notes/Domino server is online while
   the Agent incremental backups are running, and we have had no
   problems with it so far.
3. Yes, you still have to put the "-adsmpw=xxxx" in your DSMNOTES
   INCR command, because you should have two separate ADSM Node
   names defined - one for the Backup/Archive Client and one
   for the Connect Agent.  The PASSWORDACCESS GENERATE only applies
   to the Backup/Archive Client backups.  You must supply the
   Agent's password (in our case they are two different passwords).
4. I don't know about Notes 4.6.  We are currently running 4.5.

I plan to publish the results of our evaluation to ADSM-L when
we have completed it.  But so far, I can say that one of our
large Notes Servers was taking 12 to 14 hours to backup with the
Backup/Archive Client to backup 16GB.  Now with the Notes Agent
it is taking only about 3 hours to backup an average of 400MB
of "changed" Notes.  The only caveat is that it took 155 hours
(6.3) days to complete the first "full" Agent incremental backup
of around 12 GB.  I also noticed a significant increase in my
ADSM for MVS server database utilization due to the increased
overhead of keeping track of every Note as a separate filespace.
I was using a "test" ADSM server with a database size of
4096 MB.  Before the initial Agent incremental the database
was 0.9% utilized (36 bytes), and after the first full Agent
incremental the ADSM server database was 37.6% utilized (1,540).

We still have a few outstanding issues we are trying to work out.
For example, we have discovered that if anyone uses a "*" in a
Notes folder name, the ADSMConnect Agent gets the error
"ANS0239E (RC2050) on dsmSendObj, wildcards are not allowed
for the objName."  We were told by development that the reason is
because ADSM is internally processing folders in the .NSF as files
and that an "*" is an illegal NT filename character.  We are not
sure how we are going to get around this yet, because the Agent
doesn't complete the backup of the Notes database when it hits
this error.  I guess we will have to send out some type of
notification telling our Notes Mail users not to use "*'s" in
their Mail folder names!

Overall I have been very pleased with the results of the
evaluation.  I believe that the ADSMConnect Agent for Notes will
help alleviate network contention we are experiencing during
our ADSM backup window because of the volume of Lotus Notes
data we backup with the Backup/Archive Client nightly
(approximately 40GB).

Tammy Kilgore
NationsBank Florida

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