Disabling “optional network drivers” Lan0, Com1, Com3
For a very long time, the “Optional Network Drivers” that Lotus forces you to install has been a very big thorn in my side.
Who uses anything besides TCPIP anymore?
I always disable any non TCPIP ports after install as it complicates Notes configuration for desktop support people, complicates location document creation, and I had one user once who had all the default ports enabled. He also had some network drives permanently mapped. When he was at a site that could not see the network mapped drives, and he would save an attachment, Notes would freeze.
After some study, I realized that Notes was trying to build the list of places to store the attachment for explorer and searching every possible port to map those drives.
I disabled everything except TCPIP for the guy and tried the same process. The guy thought I was Santa Claus and that he’d just received the best Christmas gift ever. The attachment save dialog window instantly opened and presented a local directory.
I’ve tried several ways to get around this on install (and there is no way to disable the ports by policies).
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Program doc in PAB hidden (“policies”) view
While troubleshooting yesterday, I displayed all of the hidden views in a Personal Adddress Book (PAB) on a user’s laptop. You can view all hidden views by selecting CTRL+SHIFT and then click on the workspace icon to open the database.
I noticed several familiar NAB views. I had never viewed all of the hidden PAB views before. What a surprise. Who would have thought.
I then noticed that this user had a program document. What??
I found this on the Lotus Notes 6 and 7 discussion forum. Check it out.
Drop all after changing policies
This is a simple, but effective tip. Any time you change your policies, make sure that your changes have replicated across all servers.
You should then issue “Drop All” at the server console. Any active clients will automatically re-connect to the server forcing them to authenticate, and thus pulling down the new policies.
Upgrading the design of the NAB, replication and designer gotchas.
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.
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LDAP Schema woes
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 »