Symetrik Domino Consulting

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).

1. The installshield tuner has a bug where you can’t disable the “Optional Network Drivers” Feature. You can only select, “The feature is installed on the local drive,” and “The feature is run from source, CD, or Network.”

2. I’ve also tried setting these in the notes.ini in the InstallShield Tuner package.
Ports=TCPIP
DisabledPorts=LAN0,COM1,COM4,SPX,COM2,COM3,COM5

After installation finishes, those entries are in the notes.ini. However, as soon as you launch Notes for the first time and run the setup, the setup program overwrites those notes.ini variables and adds Lan0 and Com1 and/or Com3.!!!!

3. I’ve also tried setting configfile=c:\temp\setup.txt in the notes.ini on the InstallShield tuner, so that this line is added to notes.ini on installation.

Then during installation, Notes looks at c:\temp\setup.txt
In setup.txt, there are a few variables you can set. One of them being Domino.Port. I thought by setting Domino.Port=TCPIP, it would only install TCPIP, ….NOT..

I finally figured out how to disable the installation of Optional Network Drivers in InstallShield. It seems like it’s a bug in the InstallShield UI.

If you choose Additional Tools\Direct Editor\ then Feature, then Optional Network Drivers. Set the “Level i2″ field to “101″ and the “Attributes -i2″ to 9.

You can go back up to the Organization\Features UI section for Optional Network Drivers, and you will now see that the initial state is now set as “The feature is not installed.”

Why was this so hard to disable ???

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