Steve's Lotus Land

I've been noticing some unpleasant things with my Domino Server after upgrading to the latest version of Black Berry Enterprise Server.

Issue:  After the latest version was installed the Domino server would hang after a reboot.  It would get stuck at Applying Computer Settings.

Troubleshooting: I noticed that there were three Blackberry services stuck on "starting".  I was able to eventually get logged in via safe mode and set these three services to "Manual".  After a reboot the server did not hang anymore, it logged right in.

Resolution: There are some dependencies that need to be set on the three services that hang.  I did fin a Blackberry knowledge base article on how to do this.  The services are;

BlackBerry Dispatcher

BlackBerry Policy Service

BlackBerry Synchronization Service 

http://www.blackberry.com/btsc/dynamickc.do?externalId=KB03806&sliceId=SAL_Public&command=show&forward=nonthreadedKC&kcId=KB03806

Issue: When trying to view my Samtime contacts list using Domino Web Access, version 8.0.1, I received an error message Bad HTTP status:404.

Cause: First refer to the IBM tech note, reference number 1317895.  It is a great trouble shooting document and may resolve this issue if something is not configured properly.  However I had everyting configured properly and still got this error message.

Resolution: I had reviewed my change log to see what had changed on the server, the last change was an upgrade to the Blackberry Enterprise Server software.  It looks like BES decided to add the following line to the NOTES.INI, HTTPDisableJVM=1, this does exactly what you might expect, it disabled the built in Domino JVM engine becuase BES wants to use it's own.  This causes an issue for the Sametime functionality built into the DWA8 template because it relies on the Domino JVM to be running for the servlets to properly load.  I was able to use the all sametime functionality except for showing the contact list and anything else that required java, such as spell checker.

Change the HTTPDisableJVM=1 from the NOTES.INI to HTTPDisableJVM=0.  I then had to run a "tell HTTP restart", after that all of the sametime functionality worked, including the show contacts list.

Other Thoughts:

This feature was added to allow HTML formated messages to be sent directly to Blackberry phones.  The setting HTTPDisableJVM=1, according to Blackberry, saves about 40MB of RAM on the server.  If you change it to the "0" value as I did you may see a little bit more memory being chewed up on the server.

If anyone out there is new to Notes 8 and the RSS feature, this might be a helpful tip.  This is of course documented in the Lotus Notes Online help, but who reads those .  If your Notes server does not allow anonymous connections, you'll need to take advantage of the "Accounts" section in the personal address book.  You can set a user name and password to connect to a secured Notes databases.  This will allow the built in RSS feed reader to connect to your Notes database and grab the RSS content.  On the "Accounts" screen it typically needs the http or https address of where the notes database is located (https://notes.yourcompany.com/DBNAme/ViewthathasRSS), the password should be your internet password.  I think that there is a server policy for this too, incase you need to roll out an account to a large number of users.

I came accross an odd issue the other day with one of our users.  If you open the built-in Sametime client in a new window (undock from the side bar), use the screen capture tool, the File and Edit menu disapears.  Once Sametime is re-docked, use the capture tool again, hmmm the File and Edit menu are there now.  What's up with that?

After rolling out Lotus Notes 8.0.1 to all of our clients we began to get some phone calls from our users about Lotus Notes crashing several times a day.  After many hours of research and trouble shooting, I found that McAfee Antivirus (enterprise version 8.5) installs a scan component as a menu item for Lotus Notes.  I also found an article on McAfee's web site stating that Lotus Notes 8 would not be supported until their next release 8.7.  If you are using McAfee and have rolled out Lotus 8 be sure to uninstall the McAfee components.  I used Add/Remove and selected Change, deselected the Lotus Notes Scanner option, next through the wizzard.  After the uninstall finished, I removed the six McAfee files from the C:\Program Files\lotus\notes directory.  After completing this process, Lotus Notes 8 ran without an issue on every machine.

NCDAEMON.EXE

NCEXTMGR.DLL

NCMENU.DLL

NCSCAN.DLL

NCTRACE.DLL

NCINSTALL.DLL

Locate the Notes.INI in the same directory as above (C:\Program Files\lotus\notes)

Locate the Notes.INI in the same directory as above (C:\Program Files\lotus\notes)

*******************************************************************

** BE VERY CAREFUL ** ONLY REMOVE THE LINES BELOW **

*******************************************************************

Double click the Notes.ini, click on edit, click find, type in AddIn.

this will jump you down to the area where these two lines are located

they are usually together

AddInMenus=NCMenu

EXTMGR_ADDINS=NCExtMgr

Has anyone else noticed the odd printing issue in Lotus Notes 8.0.1? 

Case # 1:

If you open an email (double click, not in preview pane) that has HTML content then try to print it, you get a default windows dialog box, not the typical Lotus Notes print dialog. 

Case # 2:

If you try to print that same message, this time viewed from the preview pane, you'll get the Lotus Notes print dialog. 

I found a preference under the Basic Notes Client Config called "Disable embedded browser for MIME mail".  If you enable this setting then Case # 1 will display the correct print dialog but then the email does not display properly due to the lack of loading the HTML properly.  I've just continued to print from the preview pane.