Things have been crazy...

Obviously there are these large gaps in time between my postings. Well lets just say that things have been crazy my first two weeks on the new job. The customer I'm working with right now has security policies in place which prevents me from posting to my blog during the day (and rightfully so) not to mention that when we are deep into configuration of TIM and TAM the last thing I'm thinking about is this blog. So the only time I can post is obviously after hours. Up until last Friday I didn't have a machine other than my home computer and since receiving the new computer I've spent most of my nights just installing all the software needed to build out my new sandbox for TIM/TAM. Whew!

I'm still looking for a new home for my blog. I thought I had something all lined up, but that has not materialized yet. I may actually have to switch from a Domino based blog to some free service like Blogger or something. In the meantime, I finally installed VMWare on my new machine and have built a new TIM server (Only took me 2 days this time) and now I'm just getting going on preparing a TAM server.

I was thinking (should have thought about this sooner) that if I hadn't already built my TIM server maybe it would have been better to build a DB2/TDS server to hold a single Instance with all the databases for TIM and TAM. In other words the TIM LDAP DB, TIM Transaction DB, and TAM User Registry DB all on one DB2 server in the same instance with TDS installed there to run both LDAPs. Then on a separate VM I could install just WAS and TIM and the DB2 Client to connect to the necessary DB2 databases. And then for TAM I would just install the TAM code pointing to the DB2/TDS server for it's LDAP. I'm not sure if this would have been a more efficient way to run a TIM/TAM environment on my Laptop or not. I have 80GB of space and 3GB or RAM so I'm just trying to maximize the horsepower I have. Either way, my TIM server is already done at this point:

host name: tim
OS: SLES 9
Disk: 10GB
Components:
TIM v4.6 FP33, IF38
TDS 6 FP3, IF2
DB2 v8.1 (Included with TIM TDS)
WAS 5.1 (with fixpacks included from TIM Suppl)

One thing I noticed when installing this was how fast my laptop performed. When I installed this on a Dell PowerEdge 2650 Server (loaded) I remember the WAS 5.1 install took soooo long (hours even) yet on ThinkPad T60p Core 2 Duo {Review} I blew through the install in under 15 minutes. Not sure how that could be, but I was pleasantly surprised. One thing I did differently in this case than the last time I built a sandbox is I used only one DB2 instance for both the TIM LDAP DB and the TIM Transaction DB. I wanted to limit the overhead as best as possible so instead of loading up two separate DB2 instances to do this I figured I would try with only one Instance containing both databases. Maybe you would or would not do this in production depending on the desires of your DB2 Admins and the hardware you are running on.

Next job to do is build out my TAM sandbox. That's what I'm working on the weekend in between other household duties. :-)