Category: Lotus Domino

There is an issue where people will begin having issues accessing Sametime if one server in a Sametime HA environment is down beyond a certain length of time when the Server Community DNS is set up as round robin.

Essentially either the clients or the servers “forget” about the downed server. You are OK for up to some number of days where they recognize that the server is a ST server but no longer available. After that some cache is cleared and this problem arises.

This is why normal HA works just fine (when a server goes down for just a few minutes or hours) the servers and / or the clients are able to ignore the proffered IP address since they are aware that the server is not longer responding.

If you are taking a server out of service for longer than a week (or the period within which you will be recycling all of the other servers in the community), remove the downed server from the round robin DNS until you are ready to put it back into service.

In Lotus Notes 7.x the ability to “Save Window State” (File > Save Window State) was introduced to allow users to have certain databases available to them on startup.

This ability is available in Lotus Notes 8.5.x but is set up a little differently. Now you must bookmark the databases you wish to appear automatically at startup in a special “Startup” folder.

To do this, right click on the open tab and select “Create Bookmark”

Then select the “Startup” Bookmark folder located under “More Bookmarks”

If you want ONLY the bookmarks in the startup folder to show up when the Lotus Notes Client starts, then go to Files – Preferences – Windows and Themes and DESELECT the “On restart, reopen any tabs that were open when I closed the client”.

If you leave this checked, all tabs that were open will show up on restart PLUS the items in your startup folder. So, even if you had closed any of the tabs represented in the startup folder they will be available when the client starts as expected.

I recently had the need to create local mail file replicas for a bunch of folks. This is something that *had* to be in place for a certain time but we wanted people to be able to create the replicas at a time of their choosing up until the drop dead date.

So I have two versions of this code. The first, which I’m not posting here because it’s a part of a much larger housekeeping module invoked from the PostOpen event of the user’s mail file, gives no choice to put it off. The end user will receive a dialog indicating what is about to happen and then the replica creation will kick off.

The second, which is sent as a button in an email explaining to the user why they would want to do this and that this allows them to run it at a time of their choosing, I include below. It has some friendlier dialogs for the end user.

When run, the code will pop up a message box explaining what is about to happen and give them an opportunity to stop before they get started.

Then I check to make sure they are the owner of the database (so an admin opening the message on their manager’s behalf doesn’t inadvertently create a local replica of the managers file on their own workstation).

Then – and this is probably overkill – I make sure that the user is explicitly in the ACL (not in there via a group) and is a Manager. In our environment this will always be the case so it doesn’t hurt to leave this check in.  You can probably delete it. This was put in out of a concern that folks would open this in a misconfigured mail-in database (where the owner in the preferences had been allowed to default to the users name instead of that of the mailbox). We manage access to our mail-in databases via groups so it would be unusual for the user to be explicitly listed and HIGHLY unusual for them to have manager access under any circumstances.

I then validate whether or not there already exists a file with the same name and along the same path as the one I wish to create. I’m lifting the path and file directly from the server-side database. I’ve actually come across a few cases where folks have local mail file replicas with completely different names and/or in surprisingly different folders than you would expect. Ah… the creativity of the end user!  For our purposes we need to have the file path and name consistent between the local and server copies.

Note that for the LotusScript Dir$ command, Notes will only return an empty string if the file doesn’t exist. If the containing folder doesn’t exist you will receive an error “76” . But if you create a handler that contains simply “Resume Next” Notes will gleefully pick up INSIDE the conditional statement. I was prepared to create a Boolean variable that would be set if either the file was not there or would be set in the error handler but I was able to take this little bizarre shortcut.

The tricky part for me was to get the new replica to show up automatically on the replication tab. For this I need to thank Notes 411 for a little bit of code that I really should have figured out for myself. This is what the UIWorkspace is doing in the code. Basically you just open both replicas in the UIWorkspace and they will be added to the replication tab. Easy as pie. I did not have any issues getting the replica appear on the workspace as the Notes 411 logic also purports to do.

Once done, I let the user know and exit the script.

This is designed to work on Lotus Notes 6.5.x and 7.

Sorry about the lack of formatting, WordPress seems to have taken to stripping it out.

Sub Click(Source As Button)
‘Check if there is a local mail file replica and create one if it doesn’t already exist.
‘Created by Marc Bourassa – July 16, 2010

Dim Sess As New NotesSession
Dim ws As New NotesUIWorkspace
Dim dbUI As NotesUIDatabase
Dim db As NotesDatabase
Dim ACL As NotesACL
Dim ACLEntry As NotesACLEntry
Dim dbLocal As NotesDatabase
Dim docCalProf As NotesDocument
Dim namName As NotesName
Dim sDataDir As String
Dim iRC As Integer
Dim sMsg As String
Dim sPrintText As String

On Error Goto ErrorGeneral
On Error 4005 Goto ErrorDBExists
On Error 76 Goto ErrorPathNotFound

Set db = sess.Currentdatabase

sMsg = “This button will create a local replica of your mail file (” & db.Title & “) if one does not already exist with the correct name.” & Chr$(13)& Chr$(13)&_
“Please press OK to continue or CANCEL to Abort”

iRC = Messagebox(sMsg,49,”Create Mail File Replica”)

If iRC = 1 Then
Set docCalProf = db.GetProfileDocument(“CalendarProfile”)
Set namName = New NotesName(docCalProf.Owner(0))
If namName.common = sess.Commonusername Then ‘User is the owner of this mail database
Set ACL = db.Acl
Set ACLEntry = ACL.Getentry(namName.Abbreviated )
If Not ACLEntry Is Nothing Then
If ACLEntry.Level=ACLLEVEL_MANAGER Then ‘User is explicitly in ACL AND is a manager
sDataDir = sess.getenvironmentstring(“Directory”,True)
If sDataDir = “” Then ‘something probably wrong with ini file. Don’t expect system to work correctly
Messagebox “There is a problem retrieveing your data directory information from the notes.ini file. Cannot proceed. This issue needs to be resolved by the helpdesk. Aborting Replica Creation.”,0,”Create Mail Database Replica”
Goto LeaveSub
End If
If Dir$( sDataDir & “\” & db.Filepath, 0 ) = “” Then ‘No replica by this name exists. Will fail to next line from error handling if path is bad (i.e. missing mail folder)
Call db.Createreplica(“”, db.Filepath)
‘Now add to the Replication tab
Call ws.opendatabase(db.Server,db.FilePath)
Set dbUI = ws.CurrentDatabase
Call ws.opendatabase(“”,db.FilePath)
Set dbUI=ws.CurrentDatabase
Messagebox “Local mail file replica has been successfully created (” & db.Title & “).”,0,”Create Mail Database Replica”
Else
Messagebox “Replica already exists for your mail file (” & db.Title & “). Nothing to do here.”,0,”Create Mail Database Replica”
End If
End If
Else
Messagebox “You are not a manager of this mail database (” & db.Title & “). Aborting Replica Creation.”,0,”Create Mail Database Replica”
End If
Else
Messagebox “You are not the owner of this mail database (” & db.Title & “). Aborting Replica Creation.”,0,”Create Mail Database Replica”
End If
Else
Messagebox “Replica Creation cancelled by you.”,0,”Create Mail Database Replica”
End If

LeaveSub:
Exit Sub

ErrorDBExists:
Resume LeaveSub

ErrorPathNotFound:
Resume Next

ErrorGeneral:
sPrintText = “Error: ” + Cstr(Err) + ” defn: ” + Error$ + “. ”
Messagebox sPrintText & Chr$(13) & Chr$(13) & “Could not complete this task you will need to create this replica manually. Please contact the help desk for assistance.” ,0,”Unexpected Error”
Resume LeaveSub

End Sub

I recently had an issue where the mail boxes on one of my Domino servers were not compacting at all during their normal window.

My logs showed

09/03/2009 04:00:01 AM  Router: Beginning mailbox file compaction of mail1.box
09/03/2009 04:00:01 AM  Switching to copy-style compaction for E:\Lotus\Domino\Data\mail1.box due to unique fields names table size
09/03/2009 04:00:02 AM  Router: Shutdown is in progress
09/03/2009 04:01:49 AM  Router: Unable to compact mailbox file mail1.box: Database is currently in use by you or another user
09/03/2009 04:01:49 AM  Router: Completed mailbox file compaction of mail1.box
09/03/2009 04:01:49 AM  Router: Beginning mailbox file compaction of mail2.box
09/03/2009 04:02:02 AM  Router: Completed mailbox file compaction of mail2.box
09/03/2009 04:02:02 AM  Router: Beginning mailbox file compaction of mail3.box
09/03/2009 04:02:02 AM  Switching to copy-style compaction for E:\Lotus\Domino\Data\mail3.box due to unique fields names table size
09/03/2009 04:03:49 AM  Router: Unable to compact mailbox file mail3.box: Database is currently in use by you or another user
09/03/2009 04:03:49 AM  Router: Completed mailbox file compaction of mail3.box
09/03/2009 04:03:50 AM  Router operation resumed.

Since I haven’t had the need to monitor for failure of mailbox compaction, I was not aware of this issue until I received complaints of Non Delivery Errors. Specifically “554 Error writing message to safe storage; message could not be stored to disk“.

I was unable to find anything useful either from Lotus’ technotes online, their forums or using Google in general so I thought I’d post something to help out others who travel this path.

I contacted Lotus and opened a PMR but they were clueless as well. I really wanted to know what the “unique fields names table size” error was all about but they really didn’t know and tossed me a technote pertaining to “Database has too many unique field names” which really didn’t apply. They also focused on database corruption caused by  anti-virus programs. I figure that, if this was the issue, this should  have come up in the past 5 years on some of the 30+ other servers I’m working with so I was pretty sure this was also not a cause.

Long and short, I still don’t have an effective means to generically monitor for mail box compact failure. I *could* set up a monitor for the “unique fields names table size” string but it seems that seems like overkill.

To resolve the issue is simple enough:

• shut down the server,
• rename all the mail boxes,
• restart the server (allowing new mail boxes to be created),
• copy over any not-dead messages to one of the newly created mail boxes and
• delete the old mail boxes

A side-effect of the above is that my name becomes the “from” address for all the copied messages.  Anybody have a simple solution for that? I haven’t actually researched it yet since it comes up so infrequently but it would be handy to know.

In Lotus Notes, a user has recurring meetings scheduled. When the reminder comes up, they acknowledge the dialog normally.

The next day, the recurring meeting will show up again along with any others that have accumulated.

In the forums and Lotus’ Technotes they indicate that you should get a handle to the user’s “CalendarSettings” profile (some refer to the “CalendarProfile” profile but you really need “CalendarSettings”) and reset the “lastAlarmDate” field to “Now”.

Using NotesPeek I could see that the user that I was dealing with had 3 CalendarSettings profiles. One for their current name, one for an early variation on their name with which they had begun their employ with us and one with the name of one of our Junior Administrators in it.

The correct profile (user’s current name) also matched the owner’s field name in the CalendarProfile but the “lastAlarmDate” field was already current. So this wasn’t going to help me. Figuring that the CalendarSettings document was likely damaged in some way, I created the following agent to blow away ALL of the calendarsettings profiles.

Get the user to exit Lotus Notes completely, then add the following agent to their mail file and run it. Don’t forget to remove it afterwards.

Then have them open Lotus Notes. They will see ALL their old reminders which they should just acknowledge. Also, some settings will need to be redone: they will go back to the week view of the calendar if they had changed it to some other view, etc.

But, compared with the annoyance of more and more accumulating meeting reminders, the reset is a minor issue.

Name:    Getcalendarsettings
Last Modification:    02/19/2009 04:05:54 PM
Comment:    [Not Assigned]
Shared Agent:    Yes
Type:    LotusScript
State:    Enabled
Trigger:    Manually From Actions Menu
Acts On:    None
LotusScript Code:
Option Public
Option Declare
Sub Initialize
    Dim sess As New notessession
    Dim coll As notesdocumentcollection
    Dim doc As NotesDocument
    Dim docdel As NotesDocument
    Set coll = sess.CurrentDatabase.GetProfileDocCollection(“Calendarsettings”)
    Set doc = coll.GetFirstDocument
    While Not doc Is Nothing
        Set docDel = doc   
        Set doc = coll.GetNextDocument(doc)
        If Not docDel Is Nothing Then
            Call docDel.Remove(True)
        End If
    Wend
End Sub