Domino @ Symetrik Design

I’m writing this post to help some soul out there. There are lots of organizations that get themselves into multiple Domino point release upgrades and avoid upgrading the design of their NAB because it’s too much work, or they’ve forgotten the design changes they’ve made and don’t want to break anything, or too busy, or….

Our organization was in that state, and I’ve been working for the last 2 weeks to find the changes, customize a clean 6.5.6 template and roll it out. It’s actually been a pretty large chunk of work getting it right.

I found a big gotcha today when I tried to roll it out to my production environment.
Read the rest of this entry »

Today, I wanted to add a new field to our person document form in our directory for our internal VOIP telephone extensions. There are alot of people out there now using VOIP, but the problem is that our users don’t know what the extensions are for people in other sites/locations. If they would use the VOIP extension instead of dialing the long distance number, we could save alot of money.

I created a field called OnNet, refreshed the design of the NAB, populated the field with some actual data, and then went to test it out. Works great.

However, our corporate accessible directory is a web application on a Linux box that performs LDAP queries to Domino.

If I authenticated to LDAP, I could see all of the person document fields with a LDAP browser including OnNet and the data, but if I don’t authenticate, I can only see the domino fields (or LDAP attributes) that are specified in the * server configuration document. Read the rest of this entry »

In a recent disaster at our organization, we had to restore the program directory of a server. Since someone built the server with the default d:\lotus\domino and d:\lotus\domino\data, the outsource host facility restored the whole d:\lotus directory and it took us 4 hours waiting while the server was down.

This highlights some points that I always try to make about Domino disk installation: Read the rest of this entry »

I just read this blog post by Mikkel Heisterberg on Sidebar application in R8.5.

I had to link back to it here because it’s just such a cool article, and there are links to some killer sidebar applications.

When I first started using R8, I started to play around with a couple of Widgets and the sidebar. I instantly realized what the real potential of R8 could be. There are so many tasks that can be added to this location to significantly cut down on the time typically needed to perform that task or gather that particular bit of information (depending on whatever the widget/application does).

In Mikkel’s article above, he lists several sidebar applications. On his list, I found 3 that sound fantastic, written by Jeff Gilfelt.

They are as follows:

• Formul8 for IBM Lotus Notes 8
• Secret Agent for IBM Lotus Notes 8
• SideLog for IBM Lotus Notes 8

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I know in R8 this works much differently, you can now select a message, hold the shift key, and then scroll way down the view and click a second message to select all messages in between. Great!

However, in R6.5.x and below (not sure about 7) selecting hundreds of documents at a time can be time consuming.

Say for example, your log.nsf or one of your mail.boxes becomes corrupt, and you have event triggers setup for corrupt databases – you can get a hell of a lot of notification messages in just a few minutes.

This morning I came in to find 7000 notification messages that one of the mail.boxes was corrupt on one of my servers. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m doing some testing on my Domino 6.5.6 FP3 servers.

I’ve got a bunch of mailboxes that did not already have LZ1 compression enabled (mostly archive mailboxes and a few mailboxes scattered around on remote servers). Mostly, it’s been turned on, and it’s definitely turned on in all of our mail.boxes.

The only reason that it is not turned on for all mailboxes up to this point is that we had to disabled it in our OpenNTF1.7b template because we have a couple of Mac OSX users. When design would run on the server at 1AM every night, the LZ1 property would be turned on for these 2 Mac users even though, we had manually turned it off. It was weird since, technote 1176010 entitled “Which Database properties are affected by a Design Replace or Refresh” clearly indicates that LZ1 compression is only affected by design replace and not design refresh.

These Mac OSX users would have problems with their attachments. There used to be technote number 1193756 on the issue, but it’s gone now. IBM must have fixed the issue and removed the technote.

I’ve enabled LZ1 compression for all databases now with the admin client (advanced properties).

Now, I’ve set the DEBUG_ENABLE_LZ1_REPAIR=1 in our * Configuration document so that it gets written to the notes.ini of all of our servers. Read the rest of this entry »

We use Message Labs for anti-spam prevention service. They are pretty good at stopping most of the spam, but not all.

For those of you who are not familiar, we point our MX records to Message Labs servers that they specify. Then Message Labs SMTP servers filter out spam and viruses using their own algorithms and forward on the good messages to our inbound SMTP gateway.

The problem is that Message Labs can’t block backscatter as they would block valid non delivery failures in the process.

How are you coping??

It’s shocking. simply shocking.

I reported a few days ago that I finally got all of the Domino servers in our environment to 6.5.6 FP3 (plus a couple of Hotfixes – the DWA on Windows Vista, and Out of Office Hot Fix).

I have been noticing a few small things that have not been working as I thought they would. Very minor, but nonetheless weren’t working right.

So I decided to update the design of our customized NAB template. Let me prelude this with saying that I joined this rag tag Domino admin group 15 months ago. There were 2 guys running it, one with a developer background and one with no Lotus Notes/Domino experience at all. They’d both learned everything on the job, and they had both inherited it from a couple of guys who had obviously installed Domino only by the sheer merit of being able to read the instruction manual.

The design changes aren’t that bad actually, except for the fact that no one really knows why the 30 or so non-standard agents are for. Upon digging through the design, I found that the most of the design element are 6.0 design!!!! Read the rest of this entry »

Today is Tuesday, but it seems like Monday. Mostly, because I took a day off yesterday, but also because I’ve had problem after problem that seemed to have no simple solution:

First, there was a server that was upgraded over the weekend. For some strange reason, it had been generating false alarm HTTP probes.

The probe has timed out for the following statistic: QOS.HTTP.Pass2/Domain.PASS-5Q852E.ResponseTime

Second, a user was complaining that they received a “Mail Encryption Failure” popup box and with the error message “If you choose to continue sending, the following recipients(s) will receive an unencrypted copy of the message.” when trying to send encrypted messages.

Third, a regional admin was complaining that he didn’t have access to any of the mailboxes in a folder on a remote server. Read the rest of this entry »