It’s funny, I wasn’t even planning on writing tonight. I was going to try to take it easy, get to bed early, drink some lemonade, and enjoy my evening. Instead I decided that I should be “useful” somehow, and so I picked up a copy of Dante’s Inferno for some light reading. Having watched Jeopardy more than few times and taken my share of literature classes at St. Thomas I’m more than familiar with Dante’s work, but boy was I mistaking. I started reading, and it took no longer than 5 minutes for me to realize I was in over my head.

In a stunning revelation, it dawned on me that Inferno is a lot like Axway’s Synchrony suite of software. Everybody’s familiar with it, the concept is one that people understand, but it’s way more complex than everybody realized. Now here I go again, talking crazy. “How is Axway’s Synchrony suite anything like Dante’s Inferno, Tony?” It’s a simple question, with a simple answer. We know the outcome. You travel through hell, see all sorts of unspeakable evil (like a three-headed lucifer stuck in ice), but in the long run you come out into the sunset!

Sure…it may be a bit of a stretch to call being buried in support cases, health assessments, and improvement recommendations ranging from Linux OS settings to resizing your Gatway mailbox file “hell”, but I’m thinking the picture I’m painting here is a valid one. Though there’s no Virgil by our side, and we all eventually get through to that sunrise (most of us anyways ), but there’s no denying that it’s a daily battle for most of us. I’m looking ridiculously forward to that point where the light comes, but there is no denying that in the mean time it’s a daily struggle.

Today I was supposed to engage in a production resize of the mailbox utilizing the KFMCP command. Having done this only once at the tail end of a 7 hour outage with Axway French support on the phone, I wasn’t about to try this one myelf. As such we had a resource from Axway France support who is the end-all-be-all when it comes to Gateway support scheduled to be on the call with us. Do to his “forgetting”, that didn’t happen. So, while it seems we’re almost out of the tunnel on this particular mailbox sizing issue, we’re not quite there yet. We’re still “wandering around hell” as it were.

The question I pose to other users is, when do we get out? Where is the light at the end of our journey? What do we have to do to make the journey as enlightening as Dante’s?

As always though, we’re almost there. More later!

Tony (Dante Jr. )