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Wednesday 2nd ,April 2003 short day Only spent half the day at the office, I went home to enjoy the sunny 74 degrees with my kids and give my wife a break. She home-schools 4 and manages 2 toddlers too.
OK, try to fit something technical and relevant - I'm upgrading our web server this weekend. It is the last R5 server going to ND6 and I am loading it now onto new hardware (dual xeon 2.8 w/ 2gig RAM). It is a nice little 2U Compaq server (oh yea HP). I'll let you know how the migration goes. Also, I'm down to only 6 or 7 stragglers who haven't clicked the "upgrade" button I emailed them for ND6 upgrade. I'll probably have to call or visit them to give a little nudge. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 04:34 PM
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Tuesday 1st ,April 2003 ECL kicking my butt Many of my users are complaining about certain databases that give them ECL alerts where the signer is "-No Signature-".
For users of one app I just went in to their ECL and gave -No Signature- all accesses. This is not a good fix long term, but it keeps them productive.
On another small database, I went ahead and signed the thing with my ID (which they all trust) and I'm waiting to see if it will help. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 02:00 PM
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Monday 31st ,March 2003 Phantom new mail notification This one goes in the 'duh, I should've known that' category. As I've upgraded our users to ND6 a few have complained about New Mail Notification when there is no new mail. I usually ask questions, act sympathetic, and suggest that they noticed a new message prior to the notification and that the notification is just for a message that they read prior to being notified.
Today I had a user who insisted that was not the case, and after 60 seconds on the R4/5 forum I found reference to the NewMailSeqNum parameter in the Notes.ini file. Then a little further snooping found a Troubleshooting False New Mail Notifications in Notes technote that spelled it all out for me.
What a dolt, after 8 years doing Notes/Domino admin this is the first I had heard of this. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 03:04 PM
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Saturday 29th ,March 2003 Agent to process tagged spam If you read about me, then you know I'm not really much of a Notes coder. I don't take credit for this code; it was done by Scott Cole who works with me.
UPDATED: Instead of displaying the code here, I created a database with the 2 forms and 2 agents for download.
It includes:
- ProcessSpam agent that is in our mail template and deals with spam as specified by each user in their preferences
- (Calendar Profile) form so you can grab the SPAM tab shown below on March 28
- RBL Whitelist from that we have in the NAB to keep a list of ignored domains
- 'Add Host to Whitelist' agent for the NAB to open the RBL Whitelist form
Obviously you may want to play with the code for the needs of your specific environment.
Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 11:31 AM
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Friday 28th ,March 2003 Messaging Total Cost of Ownership 2003 An IBM Press Release shows some interesting email TCO comparisons between Notes and Exchange. The abstract of the origingal study by the Radicati Group shows that actually Oracle and Sun have TCO about half of Notes or Exchange, but I didn't see anything about functionality comparison. Cheep doesn't mean better value. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 09:39 PM
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Tagging Spam As I stated yesterday, I'm committed to bloging daily, but not just bla-bla-bloging. I want my posts to have some value. So, here's something that we are doing with Domino 6 that is a big hit for many of our users.  We added this tab to the mail preferences so users could choose what to do with messages tagged as spam.
Background - When we piloted ND6 we started 'tagging' spam with the spamhaus and spamcop blacklists. We quickly found that over 1/3 of all inbound messages were tagged; but due to fear of even a small percentage of false positives, I couldn't get buy-in for blocking this junk.
So, we created a 'before new mail arrives' agent in the mail file that processes the tagged messages based on each individual users preference as shown above. - Tomorrow, I'll show you the code we use. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 02:10 PM
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Thursday 27th ,March 2003 I'm Back I'm making a new commitment to blog here each day for the next month at least. Hopefully, another blog focused on Admin will have some use for Domino Blog readers.
I've been busy with our Notes/Domino 6 rollout, but that's mostly behind me so I have some time to waste bloging. :-) I plan to spend some time tweaking this blog. There are so many other awesome Domino blogs out there to get ideas from. I also plan to do some shameless self-promotion to get the word out about this blog and hopefully bring some traffic this way. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 03:51 PM
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Tuesday 4th ,March 2003 Notes 6 Training Today we trained 'Champions' for our Notes 6 rollout. Because Notes 6 is close enough to R5, it was decided that we would NOT train all our employees. But, to avoid being overwhelmed with support calls we did convince management to train 'Champions' in the departments as a first-line for support questions.
Those champions were trained today and I think it went rather well. We choose users who are generally comfortable with the PC and Notes and covered only new features in Notes 6. Now we get a one week breather and then we start rollout by department to all 200 other users. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 03:37 PM
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Thursday 27th ,February 2003 My Better Upgrade-by-mail I've finally got Upgrade-by-mail working. After more trouble shooting, I found that the Notes.ini was causing me trouble. I must have put an already upgraded notes.ini in my notes 5 config or something. Anyway, if I roll back to Notes 5 and use a generic notes.ini and then upgrade it works. To answer your question about how did I automate the install, I looked at the doc created with Upgrade-by-mail and came up with a button with this code: @Command([EmptyTrash]);
@PostedCommand([FileExit]);
@PostedCommand([Execute];"\\\\bmic5\\apps\\NOTES\\R601_Client\\auto_setup.bat";"")
The auto_setup.bat file looks like this: @echo off
REM ---------------- B A C K U P --------------
md H:\notes_backup
copy c:\notes\*.ini H:\notes_backup
copy c:\notes\data\desktop*.dsk H:\notes_backup
copy c:\notes\data\names.nsf H:\notes_backup
copy c:\notes\data\*.id H:\notes_backup
copy c:\notes\data\user.dic H:\notes_backup > nul
REM ---------------- I N S T A L L ------------
\\bmic5\apps\NOTES\R601_Client\setup.exe /v"/qb+ TRANSFORMS=BMI_ND601_Desktop.mst"
Why is this way better that what ND6 will let me do with the Upgrade-by-mail?
- critical user files are backed up as recommended in the redbook
- I can empty the R5 trash folder which disappears in R6 even though the messages are in 'All Docs'
- the email includes my own rich text explanation to the user not just plain text allowed with Upgrade-by-mail
Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 03:37 PM
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Tuesday 25th ,February 2003 I'm anonymously published The 'reader' mentioned in this InfoWorld article is me! Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 03:37 PM
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Wednesday 19th ,February 2003 Dumb error with Internet Site Docs I was so baffled about why my new Internet Site Documents were not working. The default site doc was fine, but virtual sites wouldn't work. Well, after a call to Lotus Support we determined that you just need to restart the server after Enabling "Load Internet Configurations from Server\Internet Sites docs" on the Server document.
The redbook I'm using 'Upgrading to Lotus Notes and Domino 6' explicitly says on page 391 that only 'tell http refresh' is needed.
Two hours dinkin around and on the phone for that little misprint. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 03:36 PM
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Monday 17th ,February 2003 Domino 6.0.1 upgrade disaster So, I tried to upgrade our test/development server to 6.0.1 from 6.0. What a mess. The console would display "upgrading databases with new templates..." and then just do nothing. I let it sit for over half an hour and no disk access, nothing.
So, I downloaded the full Domono 6.0.1 code and did an 'install over the top'. Same thing, just sits there.
OK, then I moved the whole data directory and put just our names.nsf in there and did an install over the top. Same freakin' thing.
Now, I'm really steamed, so I just installed clean 6.0 code over our old install and its working fine, un-upgraded. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 03:36 PM
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Thursday 13th ,February 2003 Upgrade by mail works!, need help with 'seamless mail upgrade' First, my trouble with SEEMLESS MAIL UPGRADE
I created a Desktop Settings doc and specified if running version '6.0' then use 'ExtR6Mail'. And also put a link for corp welcom page database. Then I created an Explicit policy called /Upgrade. Then added that policy to my test user.
Neither of the changes work when I logon as the user.
So...
Is the running version correct?? the example shows a build number that is much more complex.
Have I missed a step in applying the policy??
UPDATE: I did get this working - email me if you need specifics
Now, some feedback on silent install.
I took some advice from the redbook "Upgrading to Lotus Notes and Domino 6" and decided to backup some critical files before the install. So, I pointed the 'upgrade by mail' document at a batch file that looks like this. @echo off
REM ---------------- B A C K U P --------------
md H:\notes_backup
copy c:\notes\*.ini H:\notes_backup
copy c:\notes\data\desktop*.dsk H:\notes_backup
copy c:\notes\data\names.nsf H:\notes_backup
copy c:\notes\data\*.id H:\notes_backup
copy c:\notes\data\user.dic H:\notes_backup
REM ---------------- I N S T A L L ------------
\\bmic5\apps\NOTES\R6_Client\setup.exe /v"/qb+ TRANSFORMS=BMI_ND6_Desktop.mst"
The redbook suggests using the parm /qn for a silent install, but I used /qb so the user would see progress throughout the installation. The downside is that /qb also has a cancel button so that the installation could be interupted.
thanks for any suggestions on the above
-chris Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 03:36 PM
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Wednesday 12th ,February 2003 More secure web login We force our web user to change their password every 3 months and they have so much trouble with the new password because of IE's auto-complete ability.
So, I looked arround a little and found the html field property autocomplete="off". So I opened domcfg.nsf and on the password field I went to the html tab and added autocomplete="off" to the Other field.
Now, the users have to explicitly type the password each time they login. Less support calls for us, and better security for them. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 03:35 PM
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Tuesday 11th ,February 2003 The weekly Domino stuff I spent half the morning doing the 'weekly Domino admin' chores that I really only do once a month. check mail.box files for dead mail
scan replication logs to see that things look good
scan miscelanious events in event logs
check the catalog to ensure replicas are on the backup server
check Events in the Statistic Reports db
check memory levels on the servers
I really should check these more often, AND extend my list. I'm thinking that a new frameset that allowed me to just click through menu items on the left and displayed the data on the right would give me a sort built-in cheklist. I'm gonna build it, really. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 03:35 PM
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Monday 10th ,February 2003 |