Daniel Nashed’s Blog

Support for Windows 2008 R2 RDS and XenApp 6.0

Daniel Nashed — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 09:02:43 +0200

We are currently in discussion about "Windows Server 2008 R2 RDS" and "XenApp 6.0" support.
Both platforms are not yet supported. Having XenApp 6.0 support is the logical next step but we see more and more customers who are moving to the Microsoft solution with Win 2008 R2 which has been improved a lot.
Sadly "Terminal Services" have never been supported and we are looking for customer references who would need those platforms for their environment -- specially Win 2008 R2.

Christian Henseler created two IdeaJam entries.
But if you would like to give IBM more details about your requirements (Number of Users etc) Christian and me could pass this information directly to the responsible person in IBM.

Feel free to send your information directly to info at nashcom.de

-- Daniel

Windows Server 2008 R2 RDS support
http://ideajam.net/IdeaJam/P/ij.nsf/0/C9469F9AF2A784F68625775B00348A29?OpenDocument

XenApp 6.0 support
http://ideajam.net/IdeaJam/P/ij.nsf/0/5E8F792C067038A98625775B0033C477?OpenDocument

Extended Inbox Management via nshrun

Daniel Nashed — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 15:02:25 +0200

Domino provides a way to reduce the number of documents in the Inbox based on the age of the documents and if they are already read or not.
All customers I explained what the feature does immediately said: "If this would move documents to a different folder ..."
So I implemented a folder move based on the age of the modified of the document to configurable folder that is automatically created.

The only extra option beside the number of days is currently that unread documents are not moved and that you get a detailed statistic about remaining entries, moved entries and unread entries that are skipped.

Before I release a new version of nshrun with those features, does someone have other ideas what could make sense in this functional area?

-- Daniel

Issue with SMTP Extension Managers in 8.5.x

Daniel Nashed — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 22:52:05 +0200

We ran into an interesting issue on a Domino 8.5.1 FP3 Server on Linux when using SpamGeek.
SpamGeek leverages SMTP Extension Manager events which change the way the SMTP code works in the background to pass information to Extension Manager routines.
Our server crashed every couple of hours or even in shorter intervals depending on the load and after 2 weeks of debugging and hotfix code it turned out that the issue we ran into was a really bad memory overwrite occuring in some very certain situations.

If you ran into a crash situations with a similar call-stack like this, you are running into the same issue. We hope that this fix makes it into the next fixpack and 8.5.2 but it is not confirmed yet.
For reference the SPR number is #NORK86PSDM and it can hit any SMTP Extension Manager which leverages the EM_AFTER event of EM_SMTPMESSAGEACCEPT.

-- Daniel

Thread 4 (Thread -1405572192 (LWP 1938)):
#0 0xffffe410 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
#1 0xb5e64d11 in ___newselect_nocancel () from /lib/libc.so.6
#2 0xb6178720 in FRDoSleep ()
from /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/latest/linux/libnotes.so
#3 0xb6179925 in OSRunExternalScript ()
from /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/latest/linux/libnotes.so
#4 0xb617afcc in OSFaultCleanupExt ()
from /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/latest/linux/libnotes.so
#5 0xb617b0b6 in OSFaultCleanup ()
from /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/latest/linux/libnotes.so
#6 0xb6146bd7 in fatal_error ()
from /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/latest/linux/libnotes.so
#7
#8 0xffffe410 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
#9 0xb5ff7661 in raise () from /lib/libpthread.so.0
#10 0xb61949f3 in Panic () from /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/latest/linux/libnotes.so
#11 0xb615b951 in LockHandleExt ()
from /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/latest/linux/libnotes.so
#12 0xb615bac3 in LockHandle ()
from /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/latest/linux/libnotes.so
#13 0xb615c47c in OSUnlockObject ()
from /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/latest/linux/libnotes.so
#14 0xb61c9f26 in OSUnlockPool ()
from /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/latest/linux/libnotes.so
#15 0xb671e5ef in NSFNoteGetInfo ()
from /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/latest/linux/libnotes.so
#16 0xb6720176 in NSFNoteClose ()
from /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/latest/linux/libnotes.so
#17 0x080640d8 in CSMTPProtocol::~CSMTPProtocol ()
#18 0x0805aa6e in CSMTPTask::~CSMTPTask ()
#19 0x0805acea in CSMTPSrv::OnDisconnect ()
#20 0x0805c0be in CSMTPSrv::OnConnect ()
#21 0x08076fc7 in CIServ::ServerTaskProtocolMachine ()
#22 0x0807d9e4 in CIServ::ServerTaskIOCP ()
#23 0x0807f0f2 in ServerThread ()
#24 0xb61701a6 in ThreadWrapper ()
from /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/latest/linux/libnotes.so
#25 0xb5ff034b in start_thread () from /lib/libpthread.so.0
#26 0xb5e6b65e in clone () from /lib/libc.so.6

Domino on Win2008 Hotfix Needed for Performance / Hang Issue

Daniel Nashed — Thu, 8 Jul 2010 08:39:43 +0200

There is a hang and/or performance issue running Domino on Win2008 when you shutdown the server or the dbache is flushed.
This might affect your server also in other situations. We have customers running into performance issues and the fix helped to get it resolved.

Here is a brand new technote describing the problem in detail

http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21427348

And here is the referenced Microsoft technote providing detailed information about the hotfix on Microsoft side

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974609

If you are running Domino on Win 2008 you have to apply this hotfix

-- Daniel

Apple Device Version Numbers and iOS Version

Daniel Nashed — Fri, 2 Jul 2010 12:10:46 +0200

In the comments of my last Traveler posting Bhavesh asked me for a way to figure out the OS version of an Apple device when still running on an earlier Traveler version.
Traveler only knows the codes for iOS releases which are available when that particular Traveler release shipped.
In some of the earlier 8.5.2 beta builds iOS4 is also not mapped. But you can figure out from the Apple codes what iOS you are running.

There is an internal code and a code that is used in the User-Agent. Traveler uses the code in the user agent to map it to the iOS version.

So even your Traveler Server might not know about the latest code, you can see from the codes what iOS version an user is running.

In general User Agent codes of 500s are OS 2, 700s are OS 3, and 800s are OS 4

Bhavesh looked into his Traveler server and checked the User Agent codes and matched them with iOS release and the internal code.
Here is a quick list he created based on his findings.

-- Daniel

iOS	Apple Code	User Agent Code
3.0	7A341	701.341
3.0.1	7A400	701.400
iPad 3.2	7B367	702.367
3.1	7C144	703.144
3.1.2	7D11	704.11
3.1.3	7E18	705.18
4.0	8A293	801.293

Moving a Traveler Server to a new box

Daniel Nashed — Thu, 1 Jul 2010 09:17:55 +0200

I have been running my productive Traveler installation on a small PC in a VMware Server environment. The box was quite old and had not much resources.
So I decided to finally get a real server hardware (Lenovo TS200 -- a very nice and not really expensive piece of hardware which is ESXi 4.0 supported).

I was surprised how smooth the migration went. I first thought about migrating the VMware image but the installation was on XP.
So I installed a Win2003 R2 64bit Server, installed the Domino Server and the Traveler server in the same path I had on my old box.

after I shutting down the Domino server I just copied the following files to the new machine:

*.nsf files (system databases including LotusTraveler.nsf)
server.id
notes.ini
keyring files
traveler/ntsdb (couldscape based state database)

Than I gave the VMware instance the IP of the previous instance and started the server.

So the key point here is the cloudscape based state database. without copying the database all devices would have needed a complete re-sync.
Also I decided to not copy any of the changed Traveler configuration that I did over the last couple of weeks and started with a clean install.
Depending on your changes you might need to copy also data/traveler/cfg/NTSConfig.xml.

This is really not much more complicated than moving a normal Domino server.

-- Daniel

Update on iOS 4.0 Traveler Timing

Daniel Nashed — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 02:20:35 +0200

I blogged about the changed timing for iOS 4.0 last week --> http://blog.nashcom.de/nashcomblog.nsf/dx/traveler-with-iphone-ios4-timing-issues.htm
The information I have posted was darft and the first approach. But it turned out that the short timeout interval does not work well with ActiveSync or at least with Traveler.

IBM requested from Apple information how to change the timeout values back to the pre-iOS4 settings.
There is a profile that can be used to push the changed sync timeout values to the iOS4 device.

You should switch to this approach because it works better for iOS 4 devices and you should change the settings from the last posting back to the original.
On 8.5.1 you can keep the default as it was before the recommended change. On 8.5.2 you also have to revert to the previous settings.

To update your iPhone running iOS4 you need to download a profile in an upcoming Technote #4027190 "Recommendations if using an Apple iOS 4 device with Lotus Notes Traveler" and follow the instructions.to install it. You have to restart your iPhone and in some cases even remove the ActiveSync profile.

The technote is about to be released shortly.

Update 29.06.2010, 9:30
Apple has a brand new support technote describing the same issue and they also published the profile to change the settings.
See this Apple technote for details --> http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3398

-- Daniel

Enhanced PDF Output in Lotus Symphony 3.0

Daniel Nashed — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 09:46:00 +0200

The PDF Export functionality in Lotus Symphony was quite limited and specially when exporting presentations with screen-prints we ran into quality issues because the images have been always scaled down.
Now with Symphony 3.0 we have a very flexible and powerful new export option which allows you to keep the full quality of the screen prints in your presentation (lossless compression or set the quality to 100%). And we also got PDF/A-1a converting ...

Thanks to the Symphony team!

-- Daniel

Traveler with iPhone iOS4 timing issues

Daniel Nashed — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 23:32:22 +0200

Update 29.06.2010, 9:30
The information described here is not the final solution. See this blog entry for the current info http://blog.nashcom.de/nashcomblog.nsf/dx/update-on-ios-4.0-traveler-timing.htm
You should not use this change any more but instead have the timing on the iOS4 device changed to the previous behavior

See this brand new Apple technote for details --> http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3398

-- Daniel

When we first tested the final version of the new iOS4 with Traveler I ran into some issues.
After you install the new OS you have to do a complete resync because the data synced over ActiveSync is not backed up in your iTunes backup (works as designed and makes sense).

My first resync ran into a lot of timeouts and I was wondering what was going wrong.

It turned out that different iPhone OS releases have different sync timeout values.

There is some documentation how to tune for older OS versions in the 8.5.1 Traveler Admin guide.
But those settings need to be changed again for iOS4.

OS2 has 1 minute timeout
OS3 has 4 minutes timeout
OS4 has 30 seconds timeout

In Traveler 8.5.1 there is only one timeout setting that needs to fit all devices . In Traveler 8.5.2 (current beta already has it) there is a setting for each iPhone OS that will be correct once 8.5.2 ships.

There is still testing going on with the new iOS4 with 8.5.1 and 8.5.2. IBM is working on a TN to clarify some details about those settings for 8.5.1
Some details in the current beta about how to configure those timeouts might change in 8.5.2. So some detail I am posting about might be obsolete or already out of the box tuned in the right way.

So what you need to change in 8.5.2 (in case you are a beta user) is the following in data/traveler/cfg/NTSConfig.xml

you clone the existing line for AS_REQUEST_TIME_LIMIT_APPLE_3X devices and change the setting to 20 seconds like this

Traveler 8.5.2

This will only change the timeout values for the new iOS4 and this will be set already when 8.5.2 ships.

In 8.5.1 you can only tune the value for all devices. So you have to take the smallest interval of all releases and have to change the value like this

Traveler 8.5.1

For 8.5.1 you need to change another parameter to the same value as described in the admin help in the data/servlet.properties file.
This setting has been already autotuned in 8.5.2 and has been removed. So you don't need it in 8.5.2.
But for 8.5.1 you should still set the value according to documentation. The value is in milliseconds!

servlet.traveler.initArgs=ntstimeoutsyncas=20000

There is a second parameter you have to set. This parameter and value is the same in 8.5.1 and 8.5.2 but it might be removed later and could potentially be autotuned.
For now you have to set the parameter to the following value

After changing the configuration you need to restart the Traveler server task and also the HTTP task in case you changed the servlet properties (restart task traveler & restart task http)

This should give you better response time for your iOS4 devices and it should still work fine with your OS 3.x devices.
There might more HTTP(S) requests for OS 3.x devices but this is still less problematic than a wrong timeout value for iOS4.

I hope this info is helpful. It's the current state of the info we got from IBM about the changed needed.
As soon we get an official TN I will post an update.

-- Daniel

Avoiding disk fragmentation via nshrun

Daniel Nashed — Tue, 25 May 2010 06:52:44 +0200

Some of my customers are already running optimized compact operations to avoid fragmentation of their data disks with NSF.
They use a combination of compact -B and -b with the -S option to avoid recovering small amount of space from databases.

My tool nshrun already has an option to decide which compact to use based on the free space in a database.
If just a bit of space is free no compact is invoked. If just some space is free a compact -b is used if much space is free a compact -B is used.
Already in previous versions you could specify those options using -S and -s in nshrun.

But this does only reduce fragmentation to some extend. I would wish there would be an option for compact to keep some free space in the database.
There is currently no way to keep some space in the database. But I found a way to allocate some bulk space in the database in one piece which could avoid smaller allocations in the NSF would create many smaller disk fragments to be allocated. So you now can specify an amount of free space that should be in the database after compact finishes and frees space in the database.
This amount of free space is allocated in one step and would only result in at most one more fragment.

The new option is currently under test but if you are a nshrun user I am happy to send you a new version with this option to check if this helps to reduce your NSF disk fragmentation.
It will also not completely resolve all fragmentation but could potentially reduce the fragmentation a lot.

I would be also very interested to get your feedback about disk fragmentation thru NSF. I personally think there is huge potential in avoiding fragmentation.
This is not primary for Domino run-time performance but more for backup performance.

-- Daniel

Changes in HTML MIME Rendering cause some odd behaviour

Daniel Nashed — Mon, 24 May 2010 10:18:07 +0200

Since Notes 8 the client uses a different way to render HTML mail. The client uses functionality from the default operating system browser to improve the rendering.
This functionality is used to view and print read-only mails. Since Notes Release 8 I had some issues with this functionality.

- ESC does not always work
- Copying text does sometimes copy the wrong text
- Searching in the document does not work
- Some links are not displayed correctly

Some of those issues have been already technoted and the suggestion is to disable the new rendering via perferences ("Disable Embedded Browser for MIME mail") or directly via notes.ini (BrowserRenderDisable=1).
A Partner also reported that disabling this functionality reduced the number of crashes they had.

I would be interested in your experience with the new HTML rendering.

-- Daniel

LotusTraveler 8.5.2 First Look

Daniel Nashed — Sun, 2 May 2010 12:35:09 +0200

I have been using the beta releases of Lotus Traveler for a while and we got the OK to blog about what is currently planned for 8.5.2.

Disclaimer: The IBM Lotus Notes, iNotes, Designer , Domino and Lotus NotesTraveler 8.5.2 features referenced/presented here are currently in beta and are not guaranteed to be in the final shipping product. IBM reserves the right to change product content prior to ship.

Linux Support for Lotus Traveler

Many customers have asked for Lotus Traveler Support for Linux. IMHO Linux is one of the most popular platforms and is also often used inside a DMZ for security reasons.
The installation is almost as easy than what we are used to on the Windows side and Traveler works exactly the same on the Linux platform.
This new option will allow many more customers to implement Traveler in their environments :-)

No additional push port required for Windows Mobile and Nokia S60

All supported mobile devices are now using the same standard http/https connection and there is no additional port needed any more.
That's great news for customers with very strict firewall rules and paranoid firewall admins.
On the other side this means a higher load on the HTTP task and that you have to increase the number of worker threads now also for Windows Mobile and Nokia S60 users.
But in current customer deployments It worked well also for larger number of iPhone users once you increased the number of HTTP work threads (because of the long going http request used for the "push functionality").

Support for Security Policies for iPhone

The security settings for devices have now be split into one tab per Device. This is important because there are specific settings per device type (see below).

In previous versions you had to customize the template used to create the Apple profile that is created for each user when you register your iPhone with the Travler server.
For iPhones we now have options to enforce security. Those settings are pushed to the phone via ActiveSync and the device profile contains information if those settings have been set successfully.
When you push the settings to the device the user is prompted for example to add a password with certain security level. The dialogs provided by the iPhone really look great (even my mom would know what to do).

Here is what you currently can configure using the iPhone policies

There are separate settings for password strength (length, alpha chars, complex chars) but in most cases users will not like to type in a complex password anyway.
In my tests a 4 digit numeric password is what you can type in quickly and which does only show the simple 10 digit dialog. If you specify a more complex password the iPhone will show the full keyboard when prompting for the password.
You can reduce the auto-lock time and the user can only set it to a lower level than what you specify.And you can also enforce periodic password change with password history.

Beside enforcing to use a password setting the wipe option for wrong passwords is the most important option. Without this setting a simple pin password might not be a good idea.

In addition you can ensure that only encrypted iPhones (3GS and above) can sync and you can ensure that only devices that meet the specified security policy can sync (for example if you use an iPhone with older OS release or a different device implementing an older ActiveSync protocol version).

A last point that might be important for some companies is the option to disable the camera of the iPhone. But this will just hide the camera application. You can still use other applications from the App store to take pictures (this is more a iPhone limitation than a Traveler limitation and you might need to find a hardware solution to completely disable the camera if needed).

In combination with the remote wipe (already available in the 8.5.1) those security settings should be fully sufficient for most customer environments.
Other settings like disabling the App store can be still set thru a customized Apple profile that you roll out to your users but in most cases users will hate you anyway if you put those kind of restrictions on their iPhones ;-)

IMHO this is a great step ahead to bring iPhones into corporate environments.
Thanks to the Traveler team for those great new features! Great job! I said it before and I say it again... You rock!

One side not about pushing device security settings to your devices

I would recommend to use the LotusTraveler.nsf to apply settings to your devices because using policies you need to upgrade your primary Domino Directory always to the latest release and the policy settings are pushed to the traveler profile in each mail database. It takes a while until those settings become effective and it is more difficult to separate Traveler administration from Domino administration.
The same config settings settings are always available in the Travler database (LotusTraveler.nsf) and you can build groups for your users independent from your policy structure.
The changes are pushed almost immediately to your devices.

-- Daniel

Lotus Traveler Device Settings : Default

Basics

Preferences

Assignment

Default Device Settings Assignment
Include users:	Daniel Nashed/NashCom/DE
Exclude users:

using notes_ in environment variables instead of notes.ini

Daniel Nashed — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 08:10:16 +0200

By default in Notes and Domino 8 and higher the old way to enable notes.ini settings thru the OS environment of a Notes Client or Server has been disabled for performance reasons. Because in that case always the environment has to be checked before the notes.ini cache is checked. This change has mainly done for servers but also applies by default for Notes Clients.
You can specify a notes.ini parameter (for example in the custom settings section of a desktop policy) to enable this feature and allow notes.ini settings thru the environment of the workstation.
This could be interesting to set notes.ini parameters only for certain client installations like Citrix for example when moving the cache.ndk via notes_cache=
It could be also used to disable the update of the client record information I posted about yesterday evening DISABLE_CLIENTRECORD=1.

This would allow to disable this feature only for Citrix workstations and keep it enabled on notebooks and desktops.

Reference Information:

The OSGetEnvironmentString() command had an undocumented "feature" where it would use OSGetSystemVariable() first to look for the value requested. This was meant to be internal and for debugging purposes only. This has been changed so that this is off by default. What this means is that Lotus is only pulling this data from Notes.ini instead of from the system environment now, as was the intended behavior.

You can restore the old behavior by setting the variable DEBUG_USE_SYS_VAR to 1 in your Notes.ini file.

-- Daniel

Disables update of Notes Client License, Machine, Platform and Build in Person Doc

Daniel Nashed — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 23:01:41 +0200

I ran into this question today on customer site and I promised to look up the notes.ini setting for the customer. In case you have not seen this before it could be interesting for roaming users or Citrix. And also in some cases if you don't want to write the client information like hostnames of the workstation into the person document the following information might be interesting for you.

-- Daniel

When using roaming or in an Citrix environment the person document is often updated with different version number and specially machine names.
This can cause a lot of updates in the Domino directory -- specially in larger environments.

There is a new notes.ini setting that you could push via custom settings in the desktop policy to avoid updating the person document without disabling the dynamic configuration (which was the only way to prevent it in earlier releases).

Since 8.x you can use DISABLE_CLIENTRECORD=1 to disable updating the following fields

Notes Client License - ClientType
Notes Client Machine - CIntMachine
Notes Client Platform - CIntPltfrm
Notes Client Build - CIntBld

This might help to improve Domino Server performance in case of many roaming users or Citrix users.

Important Interim Fix Pack for all DAOS customers

Daniel Nashed — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 10:20:55 +0200

This fixpack has been published last night and shows up in the support alerts in Kbase today.
If you are running DAOS in your environment you should upgrade to 8.5.1 FP2 IF1

Here is an extract of TN #1426164. You can find the updates on http://www.ibm.com/support/fixcentral/

-- Daniel

A Review of 8.5.1 Fix Pack 2 Interim Fix 1 shows the following Fixes relate to the following OS:

This Interim fix addresses the following SPR's:

SPR	Description
SRIO83LSTW	DAOS corrupting attachments when creating database replica
PMAO83WTBX	'tell daosmgr listnlo missing' output has malformed NLO filenames
DROO82ZJMV	DAOS Catalog going into 'NEEDS RESYNC' State when dbdirman refresh hits mail.box.
JFOR83MJA5	30+ minutes to update the ticket count in mail users database.
JPMS7YCPNJ	Domino crashes on StaticTermProcess when we try to OSMemoryUnlock the BLK_DAOS_CTL block.

Export/Import DXL needs to discard doc object before accessing updated information

Daniel Nashed — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 23:01:08 +0200

I ran into some very behaviour today. I have used DXL export and import to change some information in the document and wanted to access the updated document afterwards.
Accessing the document after a re-open via db.GetDocumentByUNID gave me the old document instead of the updated document.
The only way I found to re-load the document was to set the doc to nothing to close the older instance of the document.
I thought the GetDocumentByUNID would re-open the database but it gets a reference to the existing document instead.

Isn't that odd?

-- Daniel

--- do some work with document ---

call doc.save (true, false)
doc_unid = doc.UniversalID

Dim stream As NotesStream
Dim out_str As String
Dim replace_str As String
Dim exporter As NotesDXLExporter

Set stream = session.CreateStream
Set exporter = session.CreateDXLExporter
Call exporter.SetInput(doc)
Call exporter.SetOutput(stream)
Call exporter.Process

out_str = stream.ReadText
replace_str = Replace (out_str, newline_string, "")

Dim importer As NotesDXLImporter
Set importer = session.CreateDXLImporter
importer.DocumentImportOption = DXLIMPORTOPTION_UPDATE_ELSE_IGNORE
Call importer.Import(replace_str, db)

Set doc = Nothing

Set updated_doc = db.GetDocumentByUNID( doc_unid )

--- do some work with updated_doc ---

new tools and projects

Daniel Nashed — Wed, 7 Apr 2010 12:03:43 +0200

The last couple of weeks have been quite busy. I am working on multiple projects and also multiple existing and new tools.
There wasn't much to report yet but I plan to blog about some of those tools soon and might ask if someone is interested to beta test for example my iostat analysis database.

I have build a couple of new tools that I use in for my own customer engagements like the client_clock, server_clock, semdebug, memory dump annotation tools for performance troubleshooting.
And I am working on monitoring add-ons which complement what DDM and Event Monitoring already provides.

I would be interested to hear what you are missing in DDM and Event Monitoring.
I have some ideas and I am already working on. Let me know what you are missing for your environment.
What I am building is not a complete monitoring solution. I am just complementing what is already there.

- special database performance probes which report into a central db to figure out about your server performance over time (to help measure server SLAs)
- combined static querying via formulas
- generate own statistics
- special database queries resulting in statistic values and also events (for example query the number of documents older than a specified time etc)
- customizable mail probes resulting in statistic values and log documents

-- Daniel

Odd hex code instead of log messages when using my Domino Start Script

Daniel Nashed — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:21:45 +0200

The most common question I get about my start script is about an issue with missing or wrong setup res files causing hex number output instead of the log messages.
I am still not sure why the res directory is created in the wrong way but I want to raise the awareness for this issue and try to explain the background.
I will also document in in the next version of my start script in the troubleshooting section.

In some cases when you start the Domino server with my start script you see hex codes instead of log message.

The output looks similar to this instead of real log messages.

12.03.2010 13:59:31 07:92: 0A:0A
12.03.2010 13:59:31 03:51: 07:92

Here is the background about what happens:

Domino uses string resources for error messages on Windows which are linked into the binary.
On Unix there are normally no string resources and IBM/Lotus uses the res files created on Windows in combination which code that reads those string resources for error output.
In theory there could be separate version of res files for each language and there used to be res files which have been language dependent.
So there is code in place in Domino to check for the locale and find the right language for error message.

But there are no localized resources for the error codes any more since Domino ships as English version with localized language packs (not containing res files any more).
This means there is only one set of res Files in English containing all the error text for the core code (a file called strings.res) and one per server tasks using string resources.
Most business partner applications do not leverage string resources and use other log calls. One of my application used a res files (nshdbcat) but it was always complicate to also write the nshdbcat.res into the right directory and to explain what it does.

So string resources contain all the error texts and if Domino does not found the res files the server will only log the error codes instead.

By default the res files should be installed into the standard local of the server called "C".
In some cases the installer does copy the res files into a locale specific directory. For example ../res/de_DE for German.
I personally never had any case but I get a mail at least once per month from somone installing my start script who is running into this issue.

My start script sets the locale of the server. For example to LANG=de_DE or LANG=en_US.
If this locale is different than the locale you installed the server with, the Domino server will not find the res files in those cases.

The right location for the res files would be for example on Linux:

/opt/lotus/notes/latest/linux/res/C/strings.res

But in some cases it looks like this

/opt/lotus/notes/latest/linux/res/de_DE/strings.res

The solution for this issue is to move the de_DE directory to C (e.g. mv de_DE C) and your server will find the res files independent of the locale configured on the server.

It's not an issue my start script could handle directly. I could put in a sanity check if at least the strings.res can be found and give out an error message.
Do you think a check in the script logic would make sense? Or would an info in the troubleshooting section of my start script be sufficient?

-- Daniel

Seemless Cluster Failover

Daniel Nashed — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:55:23 +0200

In Notes 7 you had to close a Notes database and reopen it to failover to a different server. The Notes Client did only use failover when opening a database with the right open options (failover options).
Notes 8 asks the user to switch to a different replica when the server goes down. This works in multiple areas including a view and also when you try to save a document and your server is down!

In many cases users have no idea what to do with the prompt message. There is a notes.ini setting HidePromptFailoverInc=1 which disables the failover prompt and automatically fails over without user interaction needed.

This does work for some but not all of the failover operations. For example if you try to save a document you are still prompted if you want to save the document to a different replica.

-- Daniel

LicenceKeyIssuesWithDomino

Daniel Nashed — Fri, 5 Feb 2010 15:20:34 +0200

Domino 8 uses the IBM Licence Management routines (LUM) and ships with a full licence key in each release when you download it from the Passport or Partnerworld website. If you download it from the public demo locations it is timebombed.
I don't know why the full licensed code has licence keys. They are the same for each major release anyway.

They cause specially issues when you try to install multiple versions and mix different data directories and binary directories. Also when moving a data directory you can run into issues.
Those issues still occur in 8.5.1. Because the code on Windows still queries a registry key to query the location of the licence files.
The location is determined by Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Lotus\Domino\ Value: DataPath="c:\\Lotus\\Domino85\\Data"
This is true also for partitioned servers. In my installation this key was updated with the second partition but also the first partition used this location for license checking.

There are two files involved which are version depending Domino8.lic and nodelock. So those files from a 8.0 release will not work for 8.5.

So in cases where you see an error message like the following, you should check your versions and the registry values.

-- Daniel

An error occurred during license use management initialization.
Ensure that you are running Domino with a valid license file.
(OK)