Domino @ Symetrik Design

I’ve gone around turning on Message Tracking and enabling weekly and monthly reports for all of my servers. We’re running out of disk space fast and we’re trying a multiple prong approach on tackling the problem.

We’re looking specifically at exactly who is sending large attachments.

After the happy Halloween and end of the month, I went around this morning to build a spreadsheet from the data in the reports.nsf on all the servers for the Top 25 Monthly Senders By Size. On a couple of servers, the report only contained “Internal error, unable to open Reports database” Read the rest of this entry »

I have been getting duplicate names in the Ambiguous Name dialogue box when addressing a message.

I’ve got my personal NAB, a local replica of our NAB, and a local dc.nsf on my machine. All of them are listed in the NAMES= line of my notes.ini.

I could not explain why the groups would appear this way. One group would have a mail domain and one group wouldn’t. One group would contain the members if you showed the member list, and one group looked like it was condensed (probably from the dc.nsf).

One of the guys on my team found this post.

We added our Domino domain name to the “Mail Domain” field in the group document and all was fixed, no problems when an Internet user send a message to the group, and no duplicate entries in the Ambiguous Name dialog box.

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 »

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

Read the rest of this entry »

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 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 »

When working on some new partitioned servers today, I saw this on the console of all three servers.

06/18/2008 04:41:03 PM Router: Connection from server NOTESVN1/DOMAIN not used; Server not found in Domino Directory.
06/18/2008 04:41:03 PM Router: Connection from server NOTESVN1/DOMAIN not used; Server not found in Domino Directory.
06/18/2008 04:41:03 PM Router: Connection from server NOTESVN1/DOMAIN not used; Server not found in Domino Directory.
06/18/2008 04:41:03 PM Router: Connection from server NOTESVN1/DOMAIN not used; Server not found in Domino Directory.
06/18/2008 04:41:03 PM Router: Connection from server NOTESVN1/DOMAIN not used; Server not found in Domino Directory.

I couldn’t quite figure it out because the 3 partitioned servers I was building/working on had nothing to do with this new cluster that another team member had just built for our Vietnam office. 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.

The directory catalog is supposed to be used for mobile users so that they can address mail to users or groups remotely without having to have a replica copy of the huge NAB on their laptop. For some organizations, this is not a big deal, they can just create a local replica of the NAB if it’s small enough.

For other organizations the NAB is 1GB plus in size, and managing that on a local replica for all users, and even the possibility of security vulnerabilities can be a big issue.

Other environment use dc.nsf so that their users can search via first name instead of last name. (seriously, it happens).

Let me explain how it works: Read the rest of this entry »