New Version of the IBM Notes Document Spy

I have discovered a bug in the Document Spy which prevent the widget from loading a document. If you are using my Tool please update to Version 1.1.1 of the widget. The easiest way is to remove the widget from the My widget Sidebar view and then reinstall the widget from the Document spy download page.

If you like Document Spy please share the tool on your favorite social Network. Thanks in advance. If you find a bug please leave a comment or contact me at ralf(dot)petter(at)gmail(dot)com

Replication in Notes fails with error file does not exist

Last week i had the problem that a user who got a new replica of his mail file does not get new mails again. Every time he start the replication of his mail file he got the error "File does not exist" in the replicator tab.  The replication log shows that the replica is sending data to the server, but does not get any data from the server.

Recovering from "database is being taken offline and cannot be opened" on Domino Server

Today in the morning many users cannot access the Domino Server because they get the error message "database is being taken offline and cannot be opened". In the Server tasks we see that the DBMT task hangs on a database. Our Domino admin has restarted the server to solve the problem with no success. The databases which are not accessible have a xxx.tmp file with the exact same size as the nsf file. We have tried to remove the xxx.tmp file, but the databases are still offline. Even the normal procedures to recover from database corruption like "compact, fixup, updall" did not help to solve this problem.

So i dig deeper and found out that there is a C API to bring databases offline and online again. I am not a C expert, but fortunately it is possible to call this API from lotus script. I wrote a small agent in a test database on the server which executes the API on the databases which are not accessible. For example:

Option Public
Option Declare

Declare Private Function NSFBringDatabaseOnline Lib "nnotes" Alias "NSFBringDatabaseOnline" (  ByVal dbPath As String, ByVal Z As Long) As Integer
Sub Initialize
 
 Call NSFBringDatabaseOnline("mail/hugo.nsf",0)
 
 Call NSFBringDatabaseOnline("mail/heinz.nsf",0)
 
 Call NSFBringDatabaseOnline("db/crm.nsf",0)
 
End Sub

Be sure that you have checked the option that the agent is allowed to run restricted operations.

 
 Then run this agent on the server with tell amgr run "agent.nsf" 'agent'. Replace "agent.nsf" and "agent" with the names you have chosen for your agent.

P.S. If you like it please share it on your favorite social network.

How to find the documents which reference a DAOS NLO file.

Yesterday i had the problem that a user who got a new replica of his mail file does not get new mails. Every time he start the replication of his mail file he got the error "File does not exist" in the replicator tab.  The replication log shows that the replica is sending data to the server, but does not get any data from the server.

Nice Partnership betweeen Apple and IBM in mobile business

Hey IBM really a nice partnership between you and Apple in the mobile business. First IOS release after the announcement of the partnership kills the mobile controls of xPages in Domino and IBM needs three weeks to get a technote out of the door that says that they need additional time to solve the problem with a interim fix.

Maybe you should announce a partnership with google in the browser business and a few weeks after that google releases a new Chrome browser which kills your web based products ;-)

 Repeat after me: "Apple will never be a fair partner"

Document Spy: Admins little helper

When i should choose one thing, that i really hate about Notes i am sure that i will choose the property box with the document items. Not only that the box is not resizable and really very small on todays big screen, the biggest problem is that you can not switch to Designer and still see the items of the document in the notes client.

So i have developed the Document Spy which overcomes some of the limitations of the Notes property box.  It will show you all items of the current document in a nice table so that you can see the values of all items on one look.

Ask the Experts Q&A session Managing Domino Upgrading and Migration transcript is available

IBM hosted and Ask the Experts Q&A session  about Domino Upgrading and Migration on June 3, 2014. The Audio replay and the transcript of the FAQ is now available on developer works. Very Interesting questions and answers. If you upgrade your Domino infrastructure in the near future i strongly recommend to listen to this session.

IBM Ask the Experts Q&A about Managing Domino

IBM hosted an Ask the Experts Q&A session on May 20, 2014. The topic was "Managing Domino - Managing Users, Databases, and Calendar." Russell Norberg gave a short demo and he was joined by John Paganetti and several other members of the Domino Support and Development teams for Q&A. 

You can find the recording of the session and the transcript of the Q&A part at http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27041951

Domino Policies FAQ

One of the most powerful tool for the admin in Domino are policies.  Policies in Domino are not only very powerful, but also sometimes difficult to understand and hard to implement. So many admins think that policies in Domino are buggy, because the do not understand how policies work in Domino.

Fortunately IBM has held an "Ask the Experts Q&A" session this month which answers all questions about the following topics.

• Dynamic Client Configuration & Timing
• Mail & Custom policies
• Groups
• Passwords
• General Administration

The FAQ's in this "Ask the Experts Q&A" are a must read for every Domino Admin.

Have a look at my other postings relating policies

Platzsparen am Domino Server

Ulrich Krause hat eine fantastische Präsentation auf Slideshare gestellt die einen Überblick über alle Techniken enthält die der Domino Server in den letzten Versionen bekommen hat um Speicherplatz zu sparen und die IO Performance zu steigern. Die Präsentation enthält auch viele Tips und Tricks und kann mit Sicherheit das nächste Hardwareupgrade sparen.

Folgende Themen werden in der Präsentation besprochen:

• Compact Options
• Neue Möglichkeit mit -REPLICA zu kompakten
• Upgrade ODS
• Domino Defrag
• Design Notes Compression
• Document Body Compression
• Attachment De-Duplication (DAOS)
• Transaction Log Location
• Fulltext Index Location

Honey, I shrunk the data - Mehr Platz am IBM Domino Server

Domino/Notes 9.0.1 FP1 has been postponed to April.

The for march 2014 planned release of FP1 for Domino 9.0.1 has been postponed to April according to the fix list database.

IBM Notes/Domino 8.5.3 FP6 is available on Fix Central

IBM Notes Domino 8.5.3 FP6 is available on Fix Central

This Fixpack brings new support for Windows 2012 and support for Windows 8.1 and Mac OS X 10.9 is under review for this Fix Pack. You can find all details what is fixed in this release in the release notes.

So for everyone who is still on 8.5.3 has the possibility to upgrade to the newest client os versions on the different platforms.

Neue Version des NRPC Parser auf OpenNTF

Eines meiner wichtigsten Werkzeuge zur Optimierung von Domino Performance Problemen wurde aktualisiert. Die neue Version des NRPC Parser 1.0.12 kann jetzt mit der Angabe der Thread ID in neueren Versionen von Notes umgehen. Eine Beschreibung wie man den NRPC Parser verwenden kann, findet man unter Lösen von Notes Performanceproblemen mit dem NRPC Parser.

What's new in Domino Traveler 9.0.1

IBM Domino Traveler got many new features and improvements in the last year. On Nov 6th IBM made an Open Mic Webcast to show this new Features. You can find the presentation of this webcast with all informations in this technote. 

Holiday reading: IBM Redbooks: Lotus Domino Development Best Practices

I do not know why i did not read this redbook one year ago, but i am very happy that i read this redbook in this year holidays. It is full of very usefull informations how things in Notes/Domino work and what are the best practices to write good Domino Applications. In my opinion the best part is the performance chapter. So do not miss this part of the redbook.

Lotus Domino Development Best Practices

Performance Considerations

Holiday reading: Domino Administration Redbooks

It is always a good idea to use vacation to refresh the knowledge about your good old Domino  infrastructure. So today my holiday reading  is:

Domino Administration Redbook

Domino Server performance troubleshooting

Lotus Traveler Deployment Guide

Notes Domino 9 group 1 language versions are availabe now.

The first national language versions (Group 1) for example Catalan, Italian and German of Notes Domino 9 are available in passport advantage now.

So there is no more reason to postpone your upgrade to the greatest version of Notes/Domino.

The GA2 languages like Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch will be availabe on 04.06 and the remaining languages like Greek, Slovenian, Thai, Turkish, Russian, IB Portuguese, Hungarian, Slovakian, Hebrew, Kazakh, Polish, Czech should be available on 23.07

Improve File enumeration performance in the admin client

Since Domino 8.5 there have been many files in the data/domino directory on the server. So every time you refresh the files tab you have to wait while the server scans the whole data/domino directory. Although some contents like domino/js is not scanned this can take some time. Fortunatly there is a notes.ini setting which disable file scans in the domino directory.

To enable this feature you cann add ADMIN_CLIENT_SKIP_DOMINO=1 to the notes.ini of the server or you can set this value with SET CONFIGURATION ADMIN_CLIENT_SKIP_DOMINO=1 on the console.

I have tried this on my development server. Without ADMIN_CLIENT_SKIP_DOMINO=1 the file enumeration runs 4 seconds and with this setting in the notes.ini of the server the enumeration has finished immediatly after pressing the F9 key.

Improve your Domino Server Performance on the System i

On Windows it is pretty clear that Domino Servers only perform well, when the admin regulary defragment the file system where the Domino data is stored. Unfortunatly many System i admins do not know that fragmentation of Domino databases is a problem on their system too. So they do not get the best performance possible and with every year of using the server the problem of framgentation gets bigger and bigger.

The defragmentation of the disks in a System i Server can be done with the command STRDSKRGZ.

So login into your System i with a 5250 Terminal client and execute the STRDSKRGZ command:

Configure Domino to ignore whitespace during quota check.

When you have set quotas for your mail files on a server with transaction logging enabled (I really hope everyone has logging enabled.) your users have the problem, that after they have deleted some mails there is no possibility to remove  the whitespace from the database, because the option to compact is not available for databases which are transaction log enabled*. So many admins run "compact -c" regulary on all mail files to remove whitespace. But from a performance point of view copy style compacts are a really bad idea (I will provide more infos on this in a future blog post).

So the much better way to solve the problem is to change the "quota enforcement" setting on the "Transaction Logging" tab in your server document from the default "Check file size when extending the file" to "Check space used in file when adding a note". With this setting the white space is ignored on quota calculation and your users are happy again.

* The compact for user is disabled, because a copy style compact will generate a new DBIID and a change of the DBIID of a database make a new full backup of this database necessary.