With all the talk of being able to run the Notes client off a thumb drive, let me ask this:  has anyone looked into running a complete Domino Server off a thumb drive or some other external portable device?  Here's my idea:  I want to set Domino up to install everything to an external USB device of some sort.  In case of emergency, I want to be able to unplug it, plug it into any other Windows machine, and start the Domino server (as an application if necessary) on that machine completely without having to install anything.  Just plug it in and run it.

Older versions of the installer for Windows had a checkbox allowing you to choose whether you wanted to install Domino as a service or not, but more recent ones don't seem to.  Since it's of course possible to install Domino on a non-boot drive, what I want to know is, can it be run completely independently of the system boot device, including situations where Domino is not installed as a service?  Or do I have to install it as a service to get it to run on that system?

With 4Gb and 8Gb thumb drives becoming cheap, and external bus-powered USB hard drives getting bigger and cheaper all the time, I want the option of not having to rip the drives out of a server frame in case the machine dies or the boot device fails... Windows has a habit of eating itself once a year, and I'd like to be able to, say, put the Domino drive on Nora's XP machine, start Domino as an application, and thus get the site back online while I reinstall or replace the existing server.  Another thing that would allow me to do would be to run the Domino server from my MacBook Pro, either in BootCamp or in Parallels.

Has anybody done this?  Comments are welcome, or email me.

Technorati: Domino

1. John Coolidge05/07/2008 04:36:27 PM

I have a 7.02 domino server running on a 4gb thumb drive. It is not a slow as I would have expected. I installed the server on my local machine and just copied the entire domino directory to the thumb drive

Works like a charm

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2. Chris Miller05/07/2008 05:13:38 PM
Homepage: http://www.IdoNotes.com

You can run it on a portable or thumb. I have done so for demos. However, remember the solid state drives like that don't do well after lots of read/writes. So the lifespan is not as long

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3. Turtle05/07/2008 05:18:04 PM
Homepage: http://www.weightlessdog.com/shell.nsf

But a nice tasty little 100Gb USB bus-powered drive could be very workable and in fact faster than the older, larger drives in the physical server... hmmm... this is most cool, thanks guys!

Now if only Windows could boot off a thumb, I'd be delighted.

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4. Keith Brooks05/07/2008 07:41:48 PM
Homepage: http://www.vanessabrooks.com

Now I have ideas, thanks guys
I was just contemplating this idea recently but hadn't gotten to try it yet.

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5. Bill Brown05/08/2008 08:28:04 AM

I know I ran R5 domino on a new box simply by copying the entire directory over and launching nserver.exe. Seems like the samething you want to accomplish.

Haven't tried it on anything newer.

Of course, you could ditch windows and use a real OS for your server platform. Kinda sucks that until 8.5 you have to use one of the expensive "enterprise" distros for Linux though. I'm looking forward to seeing Ubuntu as a supported option.

Laptops at work have booted to Linux for nearly 5 years. Home computer is needing a rebuild and it's tempting to make the switch there too.

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6. Turtle05/08/2008 10:23:15 AM
Homepage: http://www.weightlessdog.com/shell.nsf

Yeah, I've held off converting the home server to Linux until I can run a distro I like, and I already have a fairly hot (and cheap) machine that has 7.10 on it. The wireless even works when I swear at it a lot. If I ever get the cash to get a newer MacBook Pro, I suspect I'll probably use the existing MBP as a Domino server, just to be annoying.

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7. Dominux05/09/2008 09:51:10 AM
Homepage: http://www.dominux.net

Hi, I did it with 8.0.1.
I used this tools : { Link }

and this script :
; Script d'auto-configuration pour l'exécution d'un serveur Lotus Domino en mode nomade (clé USB).
; général
$DOMINO_PATH = @WorkingDir

; modification des chemins dans le Notes.ini
IniWrite($DOMINO_PATH & "\Notes.ini","Notes","NotesProgram",$DOMINO_PATH)
IniWrite($DOMINO_PATH & "\Notes.ini","Notes","Directory",$DOMINO_PATH & "\Data")
IniWrite($DOMINO_PATH & "\Notes.ini","Notes","KeyFilename",$DOMINO_PATH & "\Data\server.id")
IniWrite($DOMINO_PATH & "\Notes.ini","Notes","CertifierIDFile",$DOMINO_PATH & "\Data\cert.id")

IniDelete($DOMINO_PATH & "\Notes.ini","Notes","ServiceName")

; référencement dans la base de registre
RegWrite("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Lotus\Domino\1","DataPath","REG_SZ",$DOMINO_PATH & "\Data")
RegWrite("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Lotus\Domino\1","Path","REG_SZ",$DOMINO_PATH)
RegWrite("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Lotus\Domino","DataPath","REG_SZ",$DOMINO_PATH & "\Data")
RegWrite("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Lotus\Domino","Path","REG_SZ",$DOMINO_PATH)

; exécution de Domino
Run($DOMINO_PATH & "\nserver.exe")

Enjoy!

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