Domino @ Symetrik Design

After a few days of having my corrective actions enabled that I blogged about in this previous post, I have had a couple of disasters and a couple of let downs.

Corrective Action 1: It doesn’t work. The <filename> is not passed so the compact task can use it.
Here’s an excerpt from my log.
01/23/2009 04:39:54 PM Error compacting mail\somemailbox.nsf: Database is corrupt — Cannot allocate space
01/23/2009 04:39:54 PM Database compactor process shutdown

> load compact -c <filename>
01/23/2009 04:39:54 PM Database compactor error: File does not exist

Corrective Action 2: We haven’t had a mail.box corrupt yet, so I don’t know if this one works.

Corrective Action 3: Originally, I had this Event Handler set so that trigger was “a built-in or add-in task” and I choose the error message that started out with something like Unable to update activity in Log for . However, when that occurred, nothing happened. I looked in my statrep.nsf to find that the type was mismatched.

So I re-defined event handler, so that the Trigger: was set to “Any event that matches a criteria” and the event type any and severity any with the event text as “Unable to update activity document in log database.” The corrective action was nserver.exe and -c “load fixup log.nsf”

I thought all was fine now. The next thing I know one of our main servers locked up with hundreds of error messages on the console. It turns out that for every time it found “Unable to update activity document in log database” it tried to run fixup on the log.nsf. So there were hundreds of tasks spawned to run fixup on log.nsf because the message was repeating over and over again when statlog ran at 5AM.

> 01/22/2009 05:01:36 AM Unable to write to database – database e:\Lotus\Domino\Data\mail\database1.nsf would exceed its disk quota of 1024000 KB by 1 GB.
01/22/2009 05:01:36 AM Unable to update activity document in log database for mail\database1.nsf: Unable to write to database because database would exceed its disk quota.
> load fixup log.nsf
> 01/22/2009 05:01:36 AM Database Fixup: Started
01/22/2009 05:01:36 AM Performing consistency check on log.nsf…
> load fixup log.nsf
> 01/22/2009 05:01:37 AM Database Fixup: Started
01/22/2009 05:01:37 AM Unable to fixup database e:\Lotus\Domino\Data\log.nsf: The database is being taken off-line and cannot be opened.
01/22/2009 05:01:37 AM Database Fixup: Shutdown
> 01/22/2009 05:01:37 AM Unable to write to database – database e:\Lotus\Domino\Data\mail\database2.nsf would exceed its disk quota of 1024000 KB by 92 MB.
01/22/2009 05:01:37 AM Unable to update activity document in log database for mail\database2.nsf: Unable to write to database because database would exceed its disk quota.
01/22/2009 05:01:37 AM Unable to update activity document in log database for mail\database3.nsf: The database is being taken off-line and cannot be opened.
01/22/2009 05:01:37 AM Unable to update activity document in log database for mail\database4.nsf: The database is being taken off-line and cannot be opened.
01/22/2009 05:01:38 AM Unable to update activity document in log database for mail\database5.nsf: The database is being taken off-line and cannot be opened.
> load fixup log.nsf
> 01/22/2009 05:01:38 AM Unable to update activity document in log database for mail\database6.nsf: The database is being taken off-line and cannot be opened.
01/22/2009 05:01:38 AM Unable to update activity document in log database for mail\database7.nsf: The database is being taken off-line and cannot be opened.
01/22/2009 05:01:38 AM Database Fixup: Started
01/22/2009 05:01:38 AM Unable to fixup database e:\Lotus\Domino\Data\log.nsf: The database is being taken off-line and cannot be opened.
01/22/2009 05:01:38 AM Database Fixup: Shutdown
> load fixup log.nsf
> 01/22/2009 05:01:38 AM Unable to update activity document in log database for mail\database8.nsf: The database is being taken off-line and cannot be opened.
01/22/2009 05:01:38 AM Database Fixup: Started
01/22/2009 05:01:38 AM Unable to fixup database e:\Lotus\Domino\Data\log.nsf: The database is being taken off-line and cannot be opened.
01/22/2009 05:01:38 AM Database Fixup: Shutdown
01/22/2009 05:01:38 AM Unable to update activity document in log database for mail\database9.nsf: The database is being taken off-line and cannot be opened.
> load fixup log.nsf

The error on the Domino server:

Poke buffer already contains characters

NOT GOOD.

I only wish that we could have an option to only run once.

I’ve had to disable this corrective action and another one that basically did the same thing except for the trigger text was “Cannot write to log file”

I took a look at the LotusLive site – https://www.lotuslive.com/

The product/service looks very nice.

A couple of comments:
1. The demos are unacceptable. The video quality is so bad that you cannot see the detail of what’s on the screen. What’s the point of a video demo that you cannot see.

2. There is no “contact us” link or other way to communicate with IBM if you have questions about the service. There is a contact us on “buy” page and the Sametime Unyte site. I guess if you are really serious, you would have an IBM sales rep knocking on your door.

For a long time, I’ve been frustrated with Domino on the massive amount of messages that we sometimes receive over the weekend, late at night, or early in the morning indicating that a mail.box or some other database is corrupt.

Here’s a list of the common event generators/notifications we receive and a step by step guide on how I setup corrective actions to fix the problem and prevent the event task from spewing thousands of notification messages.

• Event/notification: Error compacting mail\somedatabase.nsf: Database is corrupt — Cannot allocate space
• Corrective Action: New event handler runs “load compact -c <database name>”




• Event/notification: Router: Mailbox file mail1.box is corrupt
• Corrective Action: New event runs “load fixup <database name>”




• Event/notification: Unable to update activity document in log database for bookmark.nsf: Database is corrupt — Cannot allocate space
• Corrective Action: New event handler runs “load fixup log.nsf”

This should significantly reduce the amount of messages that are generated by runaway event monitor notifications.

The following events cannot have event handlers run on them.

• Event/notification: Unable to store document in MailServer1/MyDomain mail\usermailbox.nsf (NoteID = 1264886) from mail\usermailbox.nsf (NoteID = 1209126): Database is corrupt — Cannot allocate space
• Reason: the command would have to be generated on remote server. No possible way to pass an argument to remote server on R6.5.6.




• Event/notification: Unable to replicate MailServer1/MyDomain mail\usermailbox.nsf: Database is corrupt — Cannot allocate space
• Reason: the command would have to be generated on remote server. No possible way to pass an argument to remote server on R6.5.6.




• Event/notification: Database is corrupt
• Reason: This event is generated by the router task based upon messages in the mail routing view in the log. The database that is corrupt is listed on a seperate line in the log than the “Database is corrupt” text, so there is no way to determine by <string> which database to run a command on.

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I Love Limericks, I’ll be honest. So when I saw this page on Mary Beth Raven’s Blog, I couldn’t resist.

Here’s 5 that I submitted:
there once was a man named Jake
in Lotusphere he wanted to partake
he jumped on a plane
looked out the pane
and knew it wasn’t a mistake

There once was a man named Bill
He thought Lotusphere was a thrill
He drove straight down
To Orlando town
Where he wouldn’t catch a chill

There once was a smart fellow
He swore he only bled yellow
he wrote lots a code
with a workload
but at Lotusphere he was mellow

There once was a man named Gwen
He was a Domino admin
He smiled with a grin
as he wrote with his pen
Using Exchange is a sin

There once was a man in his prime
at his desk he acted a mime
his boss came over
looked over his shoulder
and said blogging is a waste of time

Move along…this isn’t the employee that’s been wasting time that you’re looking for.

I stumbled onto this 5 year old post by Jack Dausman in a series of posts he calls “Secrets of the Administration Guild”

It describes how to create a smart icon in the normal Notes client with code to bring up a Remote Console popup dialogue without having to have the Admin client open or installed.

The code is: @Command([AdminRemoteConsole])

I will have to say that it’s a pretty clever little trick and could be darn useful to give “semi-admins” in regional sites a way to run compact on a server or something.

I just downloaded the 8.5 full client. I saw a post this morning regarding The Domino Configuration Tuner, which works on all versions of server, but requires an 8.0 or greater client to run.

I stopped using 8.0 and 8.01 a long time ago and went back to using 7.03.

I just have to say wow. There really is a huge improvement in the client. I wish it would have been like that from the start…we might be planning a R8 upgrade instead of an Exchange migration otherwise.

Whoever did the graphic design for the “Notes floats my boat” ad that appears on the front page of PlanetLotus.org did a great job. It looks great. Very web 2.0 glassy look to the ad.

I can’t say the same for the free download wallpapers that are on Maysoft.

They look like we are back in 1996, and the wallpapers remind me of the boxes that Lotus Notes R4 media used to come in.

It’s been official for a few weeks: management has made a decision, certain user groups are overjoyed, the contracts are signed, and Microsoft is set to make a few million.

I work in an organization that uses Lotus Notes 6.5.x only for email. We are a commodities trading company with 2800 mail users in about 40 countries. We do not have a document management system in place, and many of our users send scanned contracts back and forth with other companies, which drives up the size of their mailboxes enormously. We currently have 1950 mailboxes that over 2GB (included replicas on hubs and cluster mates).

This is my first post on a series of posts that I will write throughout the course of the next 18 months on migrating from Lotus Domino 6.5.6 FP3 HF105 to Microsoft Exchange 2007.

To commemorate this first post, I have to refer to this link I stumbled on today from a slashdot article about the US State Department’s recent Email interruption. The post is called “Bedlam DL3, Me Too”. Very funny, and please note it is 2004. Don’t hate on MS too easily.
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This article really hits home for alot of us IT people. As someone who has felt the symptoms of work related stress due to too much overtime and witnessed co-workers go through a burnout phase, I take stuff like this very serious.

Remember to get regular exercise, gauge how much overtime you are working, find a good family work life balance, and try to have an open dialogue to discuss any issues you have with your manager.

Here’s the BBC Story Link: Downturn ‘fuels unpaid overtime’

Here’s a quote from the story.

Employers should never forget that each extra hour worked makes people less productive

Brendan Barber
TUC general secretary

I found this story on how fraudsters steal information from recovered files on second hand computers pretty surprising. The digital realm is offering so many ways for fraud, and so many non-tech people are oblivious to it.

Here’s the BBC Story Link: Hard drive destruction ‘crucial’

The best part was where it states that you should hammer your hard drive to be 100% sure with detailed steps on how to do it including “Smashing: The more thoroughly the better.”