Domino @ Symetrik Design

I’ve been investigating why our primary mail routing hub server is taking so long to route messages recently. The behavior started a few days ago (or maybe it’s been going on for a while and we didn’t notice it).

• Messages will queue in the mail.boxes for anywhere from 5 to 15 (maybe longer) minutes.
• They do NOT have the -check in progress- (which sometimes take place when Trend Micro ScanMail or IQSuite, our mail compliancy capturing software, is holding up the router).
• Then suddenly they all route at once.
• Then the process will start over again.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have just enabled Message Tracking on an R6.5.6 server.

All I had to do was to enable message tracking in the server’s configuration document.
I added LocalDomainServers to “Allowed to track messages” field, but left everything else as is.

Once that was enabled, I issued “load MTC” on the server in question.

I initially got these errors when the task loaded:

MT Collector: Initialization failed: File does not exist
MT Collector: Unable to use directory e:\Lotus\Domino\Data\mtdata: File does not exist

Read the rest of this entry »

• The first thing you do when you install a Lotus Notes Client is that you set the workspace as the default bookmark.
• When you are browsing web pages with firefox, you wonder why the escape key doesn’t take you back to the previous page.
• You remember InterNotes webserver
• You have obsessively asked questions in the Meet the Developer’s lab at Lotusphere.
• You occasionally start sentences like “back in R3 we used to…”
• You dig out that R5 T-shirt that says “Super Human Software” on the back when you have weekend upgrades for good luck.
• You remember when you could delete or rename a Domino database at the file system while the server was up without having to run drop cache and dbcache flush at the Domino console.
• You know the (shift), View\Show Server Names trick to display the database filename at the bottom of the Chicklets.
• You know what a Chicklet is.
• You are outraged that your company is migrating to Exchange.

Edit: “outraged” seems a little too terse. This should be construed as a humorous bullet point, please don’t take it otherwise.

This weekend, I’ve upgraded 30+ servers in 10 countries. It’s been an all weekend affair, and I spent a pretty good time organizing myself last week.

First, most of our servers were 6.5.6FP2, and we wanted to apply FP3, the DWA for Windows Vista java hotfix, and 6.5.6 FP3 HF29 which fixes the Out of Office agent (OOO is enabled even after user disables it).
We had 4 servers that were 6.5.4, 6.5.5, and 6.5.4FP2. These servers were the only servers that really gave me any problem.
I also wanted to upgrade TrendMicro OfficeScan from 2.6 to 3.0 (only about 4 servers needed this).

I only ran into a couple of gotchas. Here’s how I did it. Read the rest of this entry »

We had a strange situation today where a user received a mail message that had a subject something like “NBCC > INTERCON”

This user was using the OpenNTF1.7b template, and was using DWA with a web browser.

For some strange reason, when this message appeared in the inbox, or was filed in a personal folder, the rest of the messages in the folder disappeared.

Deleting the message made all the messages re-appear. Read the rest of this entry »

Today at the office we had a situation that had never come up before. We recently created a new user, which has the same name as a very old user.

A particularly important group of users regularly send to the old user, using just his common name, example “guru”

Suddenly, these important users started getting the Ambiguous Name Dialog Box which I’m sure that they have never seen before, and I’m sure they hit enter, and the result is that the new user, who is listed first in the ambiguous name dialog box receives the email.

Important users complain, heads roll, management wants the new user’s name changed (even though his name follows our newly implemented naming convention). Read the rest of this entry »