So after a titanic two day struggle, we’ve got my home account moved to a server with a slightly newer version of NFS, and I seem to be running again. Except I don’t have Lotus Notes or Microsoft Office. Which, unfortunately, I really need in spite of the horror of having to use them on a daily basis. It seems that when I decided to blow the machine away and re-install, I didn’t save a precious little “id” file that allows me to log into the Lotus Notes server. The help desk form for requesting help for Notes requires you to specify what your Notes server is, and shows you how you can find it on your Notes screen – which of course I can’t do because I can’t get into Notes without this id file. It also promised that they’ll get back to you within three business days. Rob has warned me that there will be two more hurdles:
- First they will refuse to help me because they don’t support Linux, and/or because Notes doesn’t run under Linux. Evidently the fact that everybody in our office runs it under Crossover Office under Linux is just a figment of our imagination. Pointing out that this is just an authentication issue and not an OS issue evidently isn’t enough to get them to cough up this file without a fight.
- Even after they relent and send you the file, they don’t actually send it to you, they send it to your boss. And since my boss never reads his email and his secretary can never be bothered to send me the information when I try to recover my Windows network password (too busy with eBay and Solitaire), I’m not holding out great hope of getting this either.
Ah, sounds dreadfully familiar — used to have this sort of problem back at Ericsson. We all ran Solaris, because the apps our people needed only ran on that (IN design group), so even though they turned the IMAP interface to Exchange on you couldn’t get any sort of support unless you replicated the problem via OWA or on a Windows box running Outlook.
These days if I had to run that sort of stuff I’d do things the other way around: run Windows “natively” on the machine with a minimal setup, then Linux under VMware Server. That’s been a pretty reliable setup for me so far and avoids screwing around with Windows emulation products.
(Alternately, I guess VMware Server hosted on Linux with a Windows guest would also do the trick pretty well, it’s just slightly harder to get going.)