Symetrik Domino Consulting

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

Read the rest of this entry »

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??