Symetrik Domino Consulting

Archive for the ‘Administration’ Category

We had this case recently where a mailbox just disappeared. Upon further investigation, we found something like this in the logs:

05/12/2008 05:06:38 PM Compaction failed: Unable to bring e:\Lotus\Domino\Data\mail\someuser.nsf back online.: File does not exist
05/12/2008 05:06:38 PM Compaction failed: Unable to rename e:\Lotus\Domino\Data\mail\someuser6.TMP back to e:\Lotus\Domino\Data\mail\someuser.nsf: File is in use by another program – You must rename it yourself.

Then we found this IBM technote:

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21139606

which is entitled “Databases Are Left with .TMP Extensions After Running Compact -c or -L”

After looking in the temp folder, we found the database and were able to rename the filename.

We suspect that the cause is a backup program which coincidentally is running on this database or the temp file at the same time that compact is running.

Today, while working in Argentina, I started receiving hundreds of notifications (events4.nsf) that database after database was corrupt. This was a bit worrying to say the least especially because several system databases were among the list of databases being reported.

This presents several problems.
1. Database corrupt (obviously)
2. Hundreds if not thousands of notifications emails clogging up our admin mailboxes
3. The main support team in HK are sleeping right now.
4. I have no direct way to connect to the server in India from Buenos Aires through PCAnywhere or Remote Desktop.

I was able to get to the server console via passthru through one of our hub servers in Hong Kong.

All of our sites are not directly connected to each other, but they are all connected to our main site in HK, so passthru actually comes in handy sometimes when working at another site.

When I connected to remote console, the first message I saw was “unable to record to log – log.nsf corrupt”

Now it’s really getting bad! Read the rest of this entry »

We are about to implement a webmail server in a remote site. This site has a newly installed mail server cluster. One on the LAN and one in the DMZ to serve webmail/Internet replication.

I had previously setup the Web SSO fields in the server document for the machine that is sitting out in the DMZ. I added the server name to the Web SSO for LptaToken document. We already have this in place in a couple of locations, so we’ve proved the concept and know it works.

I placed the domlog.nsf database that I wanted on the server.

Once all that was in place, I tried accessing the server’s URL successfully directly and logged into a test mailbox without problem.

Now time to test the Web SSO. Read the rest of this entry »

On all of my Domino servers, I load some of the Windows NT, 2000, or 2003 Resource Kit Utilities. See Microsoft KB article 927229 for the Windows 2000 Resource Kit Tools download page (You can download them individually and they’re free).

Here is the link to the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools

The individual tools I use are:
Kill.exe
now.exe
Sclist.exe
sleep.exe
srvinfo.exe
Timeout.exe
TLIST.EXE
WNTIPCFG.EXE (does not work on Windows 2003 unfortunately)

I put them into the c:\program files\rktools\ directory, which is the default if you install the whole package. I also put that directory into the path so that you can execute any of the commands from any directory or any script/batch file. Read the rest of this entry »

Today while trying to load my R8 client, my client got hung.

I have been having a strange problem where when I start Notes8, it sets there trying to load what I previously had loaded, and then offers up the dialog box “Do you want to replicate data with the server?” If I say either Yes or No, Notes stops responding.

I’m not sure why this is happening, but I’ve noticed some flakiness between switching between my admin ID and my personal ID frequently, which is how I work. Read the rest of this entry »