Symetrik Domino Consulting

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 is Tuesday, but it seems like Monday. Mostly, because I took a day off yesterday, but also because I’ve had problem after problem that seemed to have no simple solution:

First, there was a server that was upgraded over the weekend. For some strange reason, it had been generating false alarm HTTP probes.

The probe has timed out for the following statistic: QOS.HTTP.Pass2/Domain.PASS-5Q852E.ResponseTime

Second, a user was complaining that they received a “Mail Encryption Failure” popup box and with the error message “If you choose to continue sending, the following recipients(s) will receive an unencrypted copy of the message.” when trying to send encrypted messages.

Third, a regional admin was complaining that he didn’t have access to any of the mailboxes in a folder on a remote server. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been investigating why our primary mail routing hub server is taking so long to route messages recently. The behavior started a few days ago (or maybe it’s been going on for a while and we didn’t notice it).

• Messages will queue in the mail.boxes for anywhere from 5 to 15 (maybe longer) minutes.
• They do NOT have the -check in progress- (which sometimes take place when Trend Micro ScanMail or IQSuite, our mail compliancy capturing software, is holding up the router).
• Then suddenly they all route at once.
• Then the process will start over again.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have just enabled Message Tracking on an R6.5.6 server.

All I had to do was to enable message tracking in the server’s configuration document.
I added LocalDomainServers to “Allowed to track messages” field, but left everything else as is.

Once that was enabled, I issued “load MTC” on the server in question.

I initially got these errors when the task loaded:

MT Collector: Initialization failed: File does not exist
MT Collector: Unable to use directory e:\Lotus\Domino\Data\mtdata: File does not exist

Read the rest of this entry »

• The first thing you do when you install a Lotus Notes Client is that you set the workspace as the default bookmark.
• When you are browsing web pages with firefox, you wonder why the escape key doesn’t take you back to the previous page.
• You remember InterNotes webserver
• You have obsessively asked questions in the Meet the Developer’s lab at Lotusphere.
• You occasionally start sentences like “back in R3 we used to…”
• You dig out that R5 T-shirt that says “Super Human Software” on the back when you have weekend upgrades for good luck.
• You remember when you could delete or rename a Domino database at the file system while the server was up without having to run drop cache and dbcache flush at the Domino console.
• You know the (shift), View\Show Server Names trick to display the database filename at the bottom of the Chicklets.
• You know what a Chicklet is.
• You are outraged that your company is migrating to Exchange.

Edit: “outraged” seems a little too terse. This should be construed as a humorous bullet point, please don’t take it otherwise.