Symetrik Domino Consulting

Archive for the ‘Administration’ Category

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’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 »

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 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

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Today, I had quite a bit of fun writing and debugging a weekly maintenance script.

I use this on all of my normal servers, but today, fine tuning this for a partitioned Domino server became a little bit of a challenge.
Tailoring all of the command line input from each of the different commands took a little bit of research.

Thanks to for Jean-Yves Riverin’s FAQ article on NSD
Frequently asked question – How to analyze Notes/Domino NSDs?

I also found other bits on the input method for nserver.exe, ncompact.exe, and nfixup.exe on the Notes/Domino 6 and 7 forum: Read the rest of this entry »