Symetrik Domino Consulting

Posts Tagged ‘NAB’

Today at the office we had a situation that had never come up before. We recently created a new user, which has the same name as a very old user.

A particularly important group of users regularly send to the old user, using just his common name, example “guru”

Suddenly, these important users started getting the Ambiguous Name Dialog Box which I’m sure that they have never seen before, and I’m sure they hit enter, and the result is that the new user, who is listed first in the ambiguous name dialog box receives the email.

Important users complain, heads roll, management wants the new user’s name changed (even though his name follows our newly implemented naming convention). Read the rest of this entry »

When working on some new partitioned servers today, I saw this on the console of all three servers.

06/18/2008 04:41:03 PM Router: Connection from server NOTESVN1/DOMAIN not used; Server not found in Domino Directory.
06/18/2008 04:41:03 PM Router: Connection from server NOTESVN1/DOMAIN not used; Server not found in Domino Directory.
06/18/2008 04:41:03 PM Router: Connection from server NOTESVN1/DOMAIN not used; Server not found in Domino Directory.
06/18/2008 04:41:03 PM Router: Connection from server NOTESVN1/DOMAIN not used; Server not found in Domino Directory.
06/18/2008 04:41:03 PM Router: Connection from server NOTESVN1/DOMAIN not used; Server not found in Domino Directory.

I couldn’t quite figure it out because the 3 partitioned servers I was building/working on had nothing to do with this new cluster that another team member had just built for our Vietnam office. Read the rest of this entry »

Finally, after suggesting it be done months ago, I was able to implement salted hash for the Internet password field in our directory.

Check this technote for details and other related technotes:

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg21255244

This is configured in the Directory Profile (open the NAB, select Actions, Edit Directory Profile)
Set “Use More Secure Internet Passwords” to Yes

This will be affective from any Internet passwords that are saved in the directory from that point forward.

You should also select each person document in the NAB and select Actions\Upgrade to more secure Internet Password.

Don’t ask why it took so long to enable this.

The directory catalog is supposed to be used for mobile users so that they can address mail to users or groups remotely without having to have a replica copy of the huge NAB on their laptop. For some organizations, this is not a big deal, they can just create a local replica of the NAB if it’s small enough.

For other organizations the NAB is 1GB plus in size, and managing that on a local replica for all users, and even the possibility of security vulnerabilities can be a big issue.

Other environment use dc.nsf so that their users can search via first name instead of last name. (seriously, it happens).

Let me explain how it works: Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, one of our admins accidentally replicated the R8 pilot server address book to a R6.5.6 production server address book through his notes client.

This royally screwed up the 6.5.6 address book. Some of the servers rebooted themselves, mail wouldn’t route, dc.nsf appeared to be out of order, etc.

We fixed it by manually replacing the address books on the bad servers at the file system level with a good copy from another server that hadn’t replicated the bad design yet. Another option to keep open is to keep a local replica of the NAB on all of your admin clients, and set your admin clients only to replicate with the server ever hour, 2 hours, or 4 hours. This way, the local replica copy of the NAB on the admin clients is pretty much up to date, but if something happens, it gives you a bit a time to discover that something is wrong. It’s not a perfect solution, but good (possible) option to have in place when you notice that something is very very wrong. A scenario might be that you discover your NAB is bad, and your local admin client hadn’t replicated for 3 hours and does not have the bad design. This can save you. Read the rest of this entry »