Notes.net Passes On; IBM Lotus Developer Domain Is Launched.

One of the primary information tools for Lotus Notes/Domino developers has always been Notes.net--a forum originally developed by Iris Software, taken over and manned by Lotus Software, and ultimately purchased by IBM many years ago. Notes.net continued for years as a meeting place for serious developers who were, originally, trying to move the Notes platform forward within and without Lotus. To a great degree, the success of Notes' transition from a proprietary workflow/email application server into a true Internet knowledge management application server was based on the activities and feedback that surrounded the Notes.net site. It seemed, to those of us who frequented Notes.net, that it was a labor of love emanating from within the Lotus organization. It contained a true e-zine of how-to articles, archives of past release forums, ongoing pre-release software discussions, free downloads, and access to highly educational Notes templates. However, as Lotus has been subsumed by the larger IBM corporate structure, many users of Notes.net have feared that eventually their highly successful portal would be downsized or even possibly extinguished.

Now, IBM has combined the facilities of Notes.net and the Lotus Developer Network Web sites into a facility that promises to be the best of both worlds. "This is an exciting next step for everyone in the Notes.net and Lotus Developer Network community," said Jeanette Horan, Vice President, Worldwide Development & Support for IBM Lotus software. "The Lotus Developer Domain will take the community that has been built and nurtured over the last five years to the next level, providing them with opportunities to experience other Lotus and IBM technologies."

The new site, called The Lotus Developer Domain, went live on April 30, 2001. Like Notes.net, the Lotus Developer Domain provides discussion forums where developers can ask questions about the latest Lotus software releases. This is not only a Notes/Domino site; it also includes all the Lotus products, including Knowledge Discovery System, LearningSpace, Notes/Domino, QuickPlace, Sametime, and SmartSuite. The Lotus Developer Domain will continue the tradition of providing free pre-release trials of beta programs, including downloads, forums, bug reporting, and technical articles. In addition, all of the usual (and difficult to read) Lotus documentation will also be kept online on the site.

Best of all, the highly popular Developer Sandbox has been retained. The Sandbox offers a place for uploading and downloading working databases, templates, presentations, and articles about Lotus products. Often in the past, the Sandbox was used as a repository for sample code that related to articles that appeared on the Notes.net e-zine.

The old Notes.net URL (www.notes.net) is now redirected to the Lotus Developer Domain. We hope that the LDD will continue a tradition of excellent service and sparkling support for all the Lotus products.

W32.Klez Worm Gains Momentum, Teams Up with Bloodhound.W32.EP

Remember when getting infected by a virus was still a novelty? Then came the I-Love-You worm of several years ago and the DoS (Denial of Service) worms that shut down large sectors of the Internet. Suddenly, those little pranks called worms and viruses have ceased to be cute anymore.

Last week (May 2, 2001), Symantec and McAfee reclassified the W32.Klez to a Level 4 threat; they see it as one of the most widely spreading wild infections to hit users in some time. W32.Klez is a mass-mailing worm that searches the Windows address book for email addresses and then, using its own SMTP engine, sends messages to all recipients that it finds. The subject and attachment name of incoming emails is randomly chosen. This worm exploits vulnerabilities in Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express: It attempts to execute itself when you open or even preview the message. Microsoft is providing information and a patch for the vulnerability on its Web site.

W32.Klez also attempts to copy itself to all network shared drives that it finds. Some variants of this worm use a technique known as "spoofing," choosing at random an address that it finds on an infected computer as the "From:" address and then using that address when it performs its mass-mailing routine. Numerous cases have been reported in which users of uninfected computers receive complaints that they have sent an infected message to someone else.

But what's worse is that W32.Klez is spreading the Bloodhound.W32.EP (also known as W95.CIH.1049) virus package that affects Windows 95/98/Me systems. Now, consider the danger that W32.Klez presents when it starts spreading the Bloodhound.W32.EP virus.

Bloodhound.W32.EP is a virus that infects 32-bit Windows 95/98/NT executable files, though it can function only under Windows 95/98/Me. The payload for Bloodhound.W32.EP executes every August 2. It first overwrites the hard disk with random data, starting at the beginning of the disk (sector 0). The overwriting of the sectors does not stop until the system has crashed. As a result, the computer will not boot from the hard disk or a floppy disk. Also, the data that has been overwritten on the hard disk will be very difficult or impossible to recover. You must restore the data from backups. Then Bloodhound.W32.EP tries to cause permanent damage to the computer. It attacks the Flash BIOS (a part of your computer that initializes and manages the relationships and data flow between the system devices, including the hard drive, serial and parallel ports, and keyboard) and tries to corrupt the data that is stored there. As a result, nothing may be displayed when you start the computer. To fix this requires the services of a computer technician. Though Bloodhound.W32.EP does not function under Windows NT/2000/XP, Windows NT system files can be infected, spreading the virus to Windows 95/98/Me systems.

Now Symantec and McAfee are seeing instances in which the W32.Klez worm has itself become infected itself with the Bloodhound.W32.EP virus. As this corrupted variant spreads, the risk of major damage to Windows 95/98/Me systems on August 2 portend a nightmare headache for unprotected IT systems.

For more information on how to prepare for this debacle, check the www.symantec.com or www.mcafee.com sites. Both sites provide a utility to remove and repair systems that have been infected with the W32.Klez worm.

eLiza, Heal Thyself

Last week (May 2, 2002), IBM demonstrated the effectiveness of its Project eLiza initiative that is developing self-managing or "autonomic" systems. IBM is claiming that this technology may save IT departments as much as 20 percent on their information technology budgets. This new technology moves beyond the original goal of self management that IBM announced a year ago by allowing systems to learn as they work. Based on sophisticated software algorithms, the new workload management technology is designed to continually improve performance across a group of servers as it learns, for example, Internet traffic and applications usage patterns. The technology is unique because it can then improve performance in real time across up to thousands of IBM eServer systems and non-IBM computers as though they were a single system. IBM plans to deliver the technology to select customers and developers in late 2002.

Through IBM's Enterprise Workload Manager and other end-to-end self-management technologies, IBM says that customers can begin to tackle the more complex issues that drive higher costs and exacerbate skill shortages.

"With these offerings, customers for the first time can begin to cope with the onslaught of technology and shortage of skills by bringing to bear networked computing resources that autonomically protect the infrastructure and balance workload across multiple server, storage, and client devices," said Alan Ganek, vice president of Autonomic Computing.

In addition to Enterprise Workload Manager, IBM announced additional Project eLiza technologies:

• ITS Electronic Service Agent--IBM Global Services is now delivering a first-of-a-kind software solution that will remotely detect and repair problems with any eServer, in many cases without human intervention. Electronic Service Agent is available immediately and at no additional cost throughout IBM's eServer family. In addition, Electronic Service Update provides proactive service monitoring and key information about the customer's operational environment. When a problem is detected, the software collects data and transmits it back to IBM, where--machine to machine--the problem can be analyzed and fixed. If the problem cannot be repaired machine to machine, IBM will notify the customer and initiate remedies, often before any system performance degradation occurs.
• Enterprise Identity Mapping (EIM)--EIM associates and tracks a user's multiple security identities across a network, enabling programmers to write simpler and more secure applications without forcing users to sign on and authenticate to each server in a network. Ultimately, this will allow a company's network to decide what level of access to grant users, depending on where they enter the network. For example, a user entering through a VPN could be granted higher levels of access than a user entering through a wireless connection, which is less secure. This technology is planned to be available on eServer iSeries later this summer and on other eServer systems later this year.
• "Raquarium"--Technology being introduced into IBM Director helps customers deploy, reprovision, update, and troubleshoot hundreds of blade servers easily and remotely from a graphical console and also allows customers to manage the hardware through graphical visualizations and auto-recognition on a single server console monitoring the system.

These autonomic technologies complement recently announced storage and Tivoli systems management software, as well as new self-healing software embedded in PCs that allows the user to automatically restore an image in the event a PC crashes.

V5R1 OS/400 Library List Problems Extended to V5R2

Last February, Al Barsa Jr. of Barsa Consulting Group, LLC informed us of a Library List problem in OS/400 that first appeared V5R1. It now appears that this problem has been extended to V5R2, and IBM does not seem to have any intention of directly addressing it.

The problem is the result of an enhancement IBM made in V5R1 to increase the maximum of entries in the user part of a library search list. Up until V5R1, the maximum for the user part of a library search list was 25 library names. The full library search list, including system part, product libraries, current library, and user part, had room for 43 names. Under V5R1, the full list was extended to hold up to 268 names. But the limit for the system value QUSRLIBL remained at 25 libraries. Meanwhile, job descriptions can list up to 250. Now that this enhancement has been codified in V5R2, some standard coding techniques in CL--techniques that have been extant since the days of the System/38--will need to be revisited and possibly modified.

The genesis of the problem occurs when a CL program searches the user's library list for entries, in preparation for executing commands within the job stream. In V5R1, IBM provided a new data area called QLILMTLIBL in QUSRSYS that limits the size of the search to 25 entries. But this new data area was not intended to be included in V5R2. This means that that some previously standardized techniques for searching the Library List will now no longer work.

From IBM's perspective, this enhancement to Library Lists entries is long overdue, but for many organizations, the fixing of the old embedded standard will mean searching through old libraries of previously functioning code and modifying it to meet the new environment. For a full look at the implications and workarounds, visit IBM's Changes to Library Search List Support Web page.

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Thomas M. Stockwell is the Editor in Chief of MC Press, LLC. He has written extensively about program development, project management, IT management, and IT consulting and has been a frequent contributor to many midrange periodicals. He has authored numerous white papers for iSeries solutions providers. His most recent consulting assignments have been as a Senior Industry Analyst working with IBM on the iSeries, on the mid-market, and specifically on WebSphere brand positioning. He welcomes your comments about this or other articles and can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..