vowe dot net :: Shortest software test ever

Shortest software test ever

by Volker Weber

After some communications going back and forth between Spartacus and myself (re: I do not test demo versions), I have received the tarball for Spartacus 1.16 yesterday. Installing now.

Installation was a breeze. Restart Domino server, add-in task loads. First message arrives. Router hangs. Notes client can no longer access mail file. Bummer. Shutdown server hangs because router task does not terminate. Reboot. First Domino induced reboot ever.

Server comes up. Router hangs. Notes client can no longer access mail file. Shutdown server hangs because router task does not terminate. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice ... Calling uninstall from "Add/Remove Software". Reboot.

Server comes up. Delivers messages as before the change. Nice.

Your mileage may vary. This may be great software. But it is f'ing up my Domino server. If this happens, the offending software is removed and never installed again. This concludes my shortest software test ever.

2004-11-30 :: email :: bookmark :: digg

Comments

Note to self... if ever I ask Volker to test something I built, make *extra* certain it works for him. :-)

Thomas Duff, 2004-12-01 01:08

Smart idea.

Usually I tolerate quite a few problems before giving up, if and only if I can test within a sandbox. Spam filters however, and especially bayesian or neural net filters, require a test with live data. I was willing to put up with some amount of false positives and false negatives. But anything that kills my infrastructure is shot at first sight.

Volker Weber, 2004-12-01 01:35

Add to that the fact, that the apparently can't even be bothered to configure their Apache Webserver correctly. The MSI files are served as "text/html" which ist really nice to look at in the browser - NOT!

By now every serious (Web)Developer should know the changes XP SP2 introduces, especially regarding the MIME Types. MIME-Handling File-Type Agreement Enforcement

Martin 'm3' Leyrer, 2004-12-01 10:04

How much spam did you get in yer inbox whilst it was running? None? It works then! ;)

Colin Williams, 2004-12-01 10:25

Have to agree with Colin, I'm sure you didn't get any spam while it was running. So there, perfect spam filter ;-)

Joerg Michael, 2004-12-01 11:16

Now, seriously: I was a little bit wary to install anything as an add-in task. I like to do these things out of process. Load a separate programm or run it on a separate box.

Volker Weber, 2004-12-01 11:40

There you go with your filters again. They never work perfectly though this looks like a worse than usual experience.

My 2 cents - Just firewall (yes, I do mean firewall) China and Korea and watch your spam load drop by 60%.

Handy, firewall friendly and surprisingly short lists of IPv4 allocated to both countries may be found here.

Chris Linfoot, 2004-12-01 11:47

Volker, stuff that will fail will fail. It won't care whether it's an add-in task or a separate program. True, generally stuff on another box can't bring your server down but I've had both good and bad experience with add-in tasks.

Joerg Michael, 2004-12-01 18:58

I tried a couple of Domino spam filtering solutions and finally settled on an external service (AppRiver). Works like a breeze, reduced spam by about 99.9 percent with nearly 0 false positives.

Gee, this sounds like weblog spam to me :-)

Stefan Tilkov, 2004-12-04 00:05