Symetrik Domino Consulting

I posted last week about the SuperAdmin OpenNTF project. I installed it last Friday and let the agent run a while, and came in this morning to check out what it could report.

Keith Brooks commented in the last post that the ability to see the templates and ODS has been available in the Administration client since 6.5, plus the ability to modify the Administration Server (not see it). This is all true, but I still find the tool very useful for cleaning up ACL and administration server inconsistencies.

Here’s my review: Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I posted about setting the administration server on all of my mailboxes at the suggestion of my colleague Jean-Yves Riverin

Well, today, I received yet another great tip from him. He pointed me to an OpenNTF project called SuperAdmin by project chef Declan Lynch

Here’s the synopsis:

Have you ever wondered if you have dead mailfiles sitting on your server taking up space, or if the all your databases are on the latest ODS version, or if the administration server in the ACL is set correctly on all databases, if so then this is the app for you.

Written by a notes admin for notes admins all the information that you need to make sure your Domino environment is running like a well oiled machine will be waiting for you once you deploy SuperAdmin.

I’ll setup it up and review it in a subsequent post.

I saw the banner ad for Notes and Domino EntwicklerCamp on Notes.net today and it really caught my eye.

The banner is very well designed.

The website is here: http://www.entwicklercamp.de

This is a great logo and I’d love to see more like this in the Notes/Domino industry.

A couple of days ago, I had a regional administrator in the Americas notify me that he had some users in his region that could not login to webmail. He was concerned that when the users changed their Notes client password, their HTTP password was not set (synced) in their person document.

As part of our desktop policy we have Domino setup so that every user has to change their password every 90 days, every password has to be at least 8 characters, and the Domino HTTP (Internet) password is automatically synced with the Notes password.

We also have adminp properly setup on all servers which constitutes of all servers running the adminp task, and all servers having a replica copy of admin4.nsf which replicates from the hubs to all servers. We even have a dedicated administration server that processes all administration tasks. Incidentally, this is where all of our administrators register users and make modifications to the name and address book. It also houses the Recovery Database, which is a mail-in database that all clients automatically send backups of their ID files to. Lastly, it also serves as our primary LDAP server for external systems to interact with the Domino directory. Read the rest of this entry »

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 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
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”