Domino @ Symetrik Design

Yesterday, I went to the “Mobilising the Lotus Notes/Domino System” seminar put on by the Lotus Society of Hong Kong.

This is the 4th IBM/Lotus event that I’ve been to in Hong Kong so far:

R8 Launch
Technical Deep Dive: Performance Improvement
Lotusphere comes to you 2008
Mobilising the Lotus Notes/Domino System

I met with Stephan Wissel and Kevin O’Connel who both work for IBM. Stephan in Singapore and Kevin in Hong Kong.

I got a couple of interesting points from them that were a bit off topic from the seminar at the end, one on one. I was discussing our inability to upgrade to R8 because the eclipse client is just too slow and sluggish and we find too many bugs. Our hardware is not up to date (up to par) and we can’t ask the business to pay for a huge hardware and software upgrade, when all they really want is Outlook client.

I learned the following:
There are some benefits to upgraded to R7 client (mail recall, view index building while you work, improved Sametime performance and awareness capability)
Additionally, we could upgrade to R8 basic client. This would give us some of the benefits of R8 client without the heavy payload of the eclipse client and a major change to the UI which would require training.

The next item at hand is how do we handle the upgrades with Smart Upgrade without it causing us more trouble than it’s worth, especially when we have no idea what hardware is out there in the field.

In doing some research on Password Recovery in 6.5.x, I came across this comment on the Notes/Domino 6 and 7 Discussion forum.

“Most security experts now agree that forcing periodic password changes doesn’t increase security – it just makes users more likely to forget or write down their passwords. Unfortunately, most corporate IT departments haven’t caught on yet. ”

This was posted by Posted by Dave Kern on 26.Apr.06 at 02:31 PM

Then someone asked him about that very statement in the next post, and here is his response. Read the rest of this entry »

Administrators can use the Domino console command Trace when testing connectivity issues.

For our company this is a useful and frequently used tool. Not all of our sites are connected internally with fat, secure, reliable connectivity lines.

We often switch between Internet and MPLS and sometimes the lines go down.

When testing connectivity from one server to another, or to test connectivity after changing a connection document, you can use the trace command. Read the rest of this entry »

Finally, after suggesting it be done months ago, I was able to implement salted hash for the Internet password field in our directory.

Check this technote for details and other related technotes:
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg21255244

This is configured in the Directory Profile (open the NAB, select Actions, Edit Directory Profile)
Set “Use More Secure Internet Passwords” to Yes

This will be affective from any Internet passwords that are saved in the directory from that point forward.

You should also select each person document in the NAB and select Actions\Upgrade to more secure Internet Password.

Don’t ask why it took so long to enable this.

We were getting a few strange sounding reports from a user who was trying to send email to 3 groups.

The first message was:
“A copy of this message was sent to 180 recipient(s), but the Internet format of this message was not sent to the following 34 recipient(s); <address@domain.com>, <address@domain.com> etc.”

The second message was:
“Document has invalid structure: mail.box”

We closed the client, deleted mail.box, opened the client, and let it re-create mail.box and all was fine.

We had this case recently where a mailbox just disappeared. Upon further investigation, we found something like this in the logs:

05/12/2008 05:06:38 PM Compaction failed: Unable to bring e:\Lotus\Domino\Data\mail\someuser.nsf back online.: File does not exist
05/12/2008 05:06:38 PM Compaction failed: Unable to rename e:\Lotus\Domino\Data\mail\someuser6.TMP back to e:\Lotus\Domino\Data\mail\someuser.nsf: File is in use by another program – You must rename it yourself.

Then we found this IBM technote:
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21139606
which is entitled “Databases Are Left with .TMP Extensions After Running Compact -c or -L”

After looking in the temp folder, we found the database and were able to rename the filename.

We suspect that the cause is a backup program which coincidentally is running on this database or the temp file at the same time that compact is running.

Today, while working in Argentina, I started receiving hundreds of notifications (events4.nsf) that database after database was corrupt. This was a bit worrying to say the least especially because several system databases were among the list of databases being reported.

This presents several problems.
1. Database corrupt (obviously)
2. Hundreds if not thousands of notifications emails clogging up our admin mailboxes
3. The main support team in HK are sleeping right now.
4. I have no direct way to connect to the server in India from Buenos Aires through PCAnywhere or Remote Desktop.

I was able to get to the server console via passthru through one of our hub servers in Hong Kong.

All of our sites are not directly connected to each other, but they are all connected to our main site in HK, so passthru actually comes in handy sometimes when working at another site.

When I connected to remote console, the first message I saw was “unable to record to log – log.nsf corrupt”

Now it’s really getting bad! Read the rest of this entry »