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Tuesday 29th ,April 2003 Switching to BlogSphere No time to blog anything technical today. I'm moving my stories to a BlogSphere database.
Go here to see the new stuff Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 01:27 PM
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Monday 28th ,April 2003 Great spam article Brian Hayes has a great article 'Spam, Spam, Spam, Lovely Spam' on the history and present state of fighting spam. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 09:11 AM
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Friday 25th ,April 2003 Deletion Stubs What I had always heard was that for performance reasons you want to get rid of these non-documents as soon as reasonably possible. But then our NAB (directory in new-speak) has ended up with previously deleted users 3 times since the first of the year. Well, today I figured out what the deal is. Our departments have 'loner laptops' that may sit on the shelf for 2 or 3 months before they get used. So, a user grabs that laptop, plugs into the net and starts to replicate before leaving on a trip and SLAP, old users are re-populated into our NAB. So, I'm thinking that we don't delete hundreds of users in our little 220 person company and so we should be fine to keep those deletion stubs around for years. Well, I guess setting the "Remove documents not modified in the last x days" maxes out at 999. But, that should give us roughly 500 days of staying time for our stubs and I hope that will be enough. And, how do you tell how many stubs you have in a database anyway?
- NotesPeek
- at the console 'show database dbname
- Deletion Analyzer
UPDATE - read the response (click on story title) by Julian Robichaux for a link to another tool. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 03:07 PM
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Thursday 24th ,April 2003 Browser birthday Mike Golding has an interesting blog today on Notestips.com about the browser being 10 years old. I too remember good ol' Mosaic. My first thoughts were 'I don't get it. How is this better than CompuServe?'
Well pretty quick I began to get it and even left a Notes admin job to go back to NT admin because I was sure Notes would be buried by the web and browsers. Then 2 months later Lotus was bought by IBM and they began to "work the web". 2 years after that I started my current job which is heavy network, server and notes admin. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 01:50 PM
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Using Notes6 Spam filter I got an email today asking how we setup the Notes 6 RBL. Well, I won't go into that because it's in the book, but I will mention 2 other items I mentioned to the requester.
First, the 'show stat smtp' command is a great way to tell how much you are blocking or tagging.
And, at Lotusphere this year I heard from one of the speakers that 3 or 4 lists is a realistic maximum for the number of lists to check. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 10:34 AM
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Wednesday 23rd ,April 2003 ECL Mystery Solved On April 1 and April 15 I blogged about ECL alerts from -No Signature-. After opening an incident with Lotus, we determined that when security is based on roles and the signer of the design elements is granted that role via group instead of being specifically listed in the ACL this can happen. Here is part of an email I got back from Lotus support:
What I found on this was a situation where "No signature" ECL alerts were being sent when a role or a group was listed in the security tab for a database on a server. As the work-around, it stated that if you add the signer of the design element in the security tab of that design elements properties, you would get no alert or an alert with the name of the Signer ( depending of your ECL settings ). In order to do that, it stated that you need to add the Signer in the ACL of the database. The problem appears if there is only a role in the security tab and only if the database is on a server.
The original SPR was about a view, but it appears to be the same issue. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 03:44 PM
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Tuesday 22nd ,April 2003 Department Calendar Well, no new look yet, but I thought I'd talk about creating a special purpose calendar. We use departmental calendars for large groups to post vacations, training, out-of-town events, etc. so users can quickly scan when people in their department are away from the office. Anyway, I updated our template for these calendars today to a more R6 look. Here's how I create a calendar for this purpose.
First I start with the standard mail template and make thexe changes:
- On the ($Calendar) view, remove the "Schedule a Meeting" action and "Tools" actions.
- On the ($Meetings) view, remove the "Schedule a Meeting" action and "Tools" actions.
- Set the Launch property for the database to "CalendarFS" frameset
- Change the form "Switcher Form for Calendar"
- Remove the "Calendar" actions & sub-actions
- Change the <computed value> to @DbTitle
- Put a blank line above and below the <computed value> line Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 03:43 PM
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Thursday 17th ,April 2003 Alerts and attachment blocking Well, it does seem that our upgrade to ND6 has wrecked alerts for many of our users and the usual disable - reenable trick has no effect. As I mentioned on April 9 checking the ($Alerts) folder is very helpful in troubleshooting; but I had to resort to deleting the folder to fix things. I also found that doing a replace design to another template and then back to our custom template also changed the ($Alerts) folder enough to get it going again. This is very troubleing and I'm wondering if I should automate the fix. I would run it for everyone accept all current alerts are lost in the process.
Attachments - We use McAfee as our first line of email defense for viruses and a profanity list. Today we added blocking of certain attachments as well. Our CIO wanted to run this past upper management to get the go-ahead, but they agreed that there is no need for executable code to be sent to the average user. So, if there is a legitimate business need for these files, they must be zipped or renamed prior to sending. We now block files with these extensions: VBS, EML, SHS, JS, PIF, SCR, VB, CMD, CHM, BAT, COM, and EXE. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 08:52 PM
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Morning blog (preview) This is weird bloging first thing in the morning. This is actually sorta a 'blog preview' of what to expect the next few days.
My inbox this morning added 2 new users complaining about not getting alarms since our upgrade to Notes 6. This makes the total about 7. Bummer! I'm gonna spend some time on that today along with the ECL thing, and some security checking. Also, we just added some new attachment blocking to inbound email and so, you'll hear back about all that stuff later today or in the next few days. Also this weekend I hope to work on the look of this site and probably go to a white background. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 08:00 AM
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Wednesday 16th ,April 2003 Super Gadget "The Philips iPronto may well be a gadget-lover's dream come true". Well, for $1700 bucks, it should be. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 01:17 PM
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Tuesday 15th ,April 2003 ECL update and change to 'comments' on this blog ECL is still kicking my butt. On April 1, I blogged about ECL alerts from -No Signature-. I tried signing the database but that did no good. Ed posted a comment on that item stating that he has the same problem. I think I'm gonna have to open an incident with Lotus about this. Ed also asked me to nix the RTF on the response form for this blog. I liked that idea, so it's done. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 03:37 PM
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Friday 11th ,April 2003 I'm nervous OK, I just turned web logging on for this server 2 days ago and I'm officially freaked out that 30 individual IP addresses hit this blog yesterday. I'm feeling the pressure to actually have worthwhile content.
Keep coming back - I won't let you down. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 10:36 AM
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broadband through power lines CNN has a cool story about Getting broadband through power lines. It's not going to bury cable and DSL, but it might be an interesting alternative. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 09:29 AM
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Wednesday 9th ,April 2003 Alerts not alerting I have a user who's not receiving any alerts. Usually I simply disable and then re-enable the alerts in the Preferences dialog and that takes care of this sort of thing. Not this time.
Some time on the ND6 Forum suggested checking the hidden ($Alerts) view which can be seen by opening the database while holding Ctrl-Shift. This was a big help in determining that Alerts were definitely not being put in that folder, but we were still no closer to resolution.
So, I deleted the ($Alerts) folder and then did a refresh design to get it back. After this, newly created appointments did show up in the folder. A quick edit and re-save of appointments in the future added them to the folder also. :-) Another happy user. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 09:21 PM
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Tuesday 8th ,April 2003 RBL Whitelist work-around I read a great post on LDD by Christopher Linfoot about how they came up with a work-around for whitelisting by using 2 smtp servers. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 08:15 AM
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Friday 4th ,April 2003 server not ready, rats! Lack of planning or whatever, but a critical peice of the web server I'm building as an upgrade to our current system is the DB2 Connector. So instead of installing version 6.1 that we got 3 years ago, I installed version 8 that we just got and I just can't get the thing configured right. So, I could just put the old version on so we can still complete the upgrade tomorrow as planned? Wrong, the only CD for the older version is off-site in a Disaster Recovery Kit with our tapes and its $$ to make a special request for it.
So, that will have to wait until next week; but it's probably for the best. I can have our AS/400 guru work on the connector and make double sure everything else is ready to go.
On a personal note, I'm about 2/3 through the book Wild at Heart which has me totally energized. It's message is like "God didn't create us to be wimpy sorta wet noodle men like we see all around us. But, He created us to be strong, adventureous and anything but tame (like He is)." Now, I'm off to see The Two Towers and get a big dose of war and mayhem. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 05:37 PM
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Thursday 3rd ,April 2003 |