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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 News Article Look, an article on Bloging in the workplace. Posted by Christopher R HarveyPosted : 10:31 AM
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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 |