Domino Diva

 I want to remind everyone that the Lotus Domino 8.5.x installations are saved to release V6R1 for the iSeries.  I recently worked with a customer to upgrade their environment to 8.5 and installation of the Domino server code took over 3 hours.  Their OS level is V5R4 and they have an older model 810. 

Once the installation was underway, the CPU utilization on the iSeries server hovered in the 70-95% range for the duration of the installation of the Domino 8.5 code.  There were 3 jobs consuming the majority of the CPU:

LDFX01
LDFX02
LDFX04

These LDFX jobs are the jobs associated with doing the program conversion.  Interestingly enough, they were only visible through the WRKSYSACT command, they did not show up in WRKACTJOB.  This is how the good old CFINIT jobs behave as well.  You have to have the performance tools loaded on your iSeries server to use the WRKSYSACT command.

Beware when installing Domino 8.5.x on a V5R4 system, the program conversions will increase installation time.  While my customer experienced an increase of 3 hours+, newer, faster systems will see shorter program conversion times.  One the newer hardware, the program conversions can be done in around 10 minutes.

Make sure you plan for the added time the installation will take due to the program conversion and ensure you don't decide to do the installation during production hours because of the significant increase in CPU consumption.  The multi-version capability has made this a regular practice in a number of iSeries shops.  While this normally has no impact on production applications, the program conversion can cause performance concerns to other applications running on the iSeries server.

The program conversion will also happen when installing 8.5.x hotfixes on a V5R4 system.

 In working with a customer recently, we were looking for ways to free up some disk space on their iSeries server.  This customer had this as their Domino upgrade path over the past several years:

6.5.0 -> 6.5.1 -> 6.5.2 -> 6.5.3 -> 8.0.1 -> 8.5

The older Domino code loads had all been removed, however the contents of the /QIBM/ProdData/Lotus/DominoXXX directories had not been cleaned up.  We found code in the /Domino650, /Domino 651, /Domino652, and Domino653 subdirectories.  The /Domino801 subdirectory was empty, however the subdirectory was still on the system. 

All of the programs, service programs, and jar files for a specific release of Domino are stored in the /DominoXXX subdirectory for that specific release of Domino server code.  With the actual licensed program product for the release of Domino removed from the server, there was no need to have these directory structures left on the server. 

In order to delete these directories and their contents, we used the Edit File utility (EDTF) which has an option to recursively delete the contents of the subdirectories and then the subdirectories themselves. Upon entering the command below, you will see all of the /DominoXXX subdirectories that exist on your system.  

I have a customer that has about 550 users; of these 550 users, about 12 were reporting that they were receiving the OOO reminder email every morning, even though they had turned their OOO agents off.  The document properties showed the messages were received every morning at 3:59 AM.  About half of the users were using the iNotes6 template and the other half were using the Std6Mail template. The server level is 6.5.6 FP3. 

 In trying to figure out why these handful of users were receiving the reminder message to turn their OOO agents off, I did the following:

• checked that their OOO agents were not enabled
• ensured the users did not have local copies or replicas that may be causing issues
• made sure the users didn't have local archives with the OOO agent enabled
• checked for replicas on other servers in the domain
• checked the schedule of all agents on the server and din't see any OOO agents scheduled for these users nor were there any agents scheduled to run at 3:59 AM
• using NoteMan, looked at the contents of the OutOfOfficeProfile documents and ensured the documents were not corrupt in any way
  
• deleted the OutOfOficeProfile profile documents for the affected users
  
• deleted the form (OutOfOfficeProfile) and the agents OutOfOffice and (Edit Office Profile) from the affected mail files and then refreshed their design so these design elements were pulled from the template [prior to doing so, checked the templates to make sure the OOO agent wasn't enabled in the templates, everything checked out just fine]
• checked the document properties of the OOO agent reminder emails and looked for clues there, this turned up nothing as well
  

With all of these items turning up empty, I next enabled debug to capture agent execution details and then combed through the output.  This revealed the following message being generated for each of the affected users at 3:59 AM.

"AMgr: Received new mail event from Router for 'mail/xxxxx.nsf' "

So indeed the users were being sent the OOO remidner emails, but still no clues as to what was causing the reminder emails to be sent.

In looking at the tasks running on the server, I noticed the UPDATE task was not running.  The ServerTasks= line in the notes.ini had been edited and this task had been removed from the ServerTasks variable.  When inquiring about this, I found out this was a change a consultant that had previously been engaged had made.  There had been no specific reason given for removing the task.

I had the customer add the UPDATE task back to the ServerTasks= variable and then do a 'load update' at the console to get the task running right away.  This fixed the problem, no more OOO reminder messages were sent to the affected users.  I have to admit this is the strangest OOO agent issue I have worked on.

In my most recent blog entry when I migrated a customer from Domino on Linux to Domino on iSeries ( Fun day tomorrow!  ) I noted there was an issue with the CFGDOMSVR command not taking the TIMEZONE parameter.  I did some checking and found this is a known issue with an open SPR.  This issue is planned to be fixed in release 8.0.3.

The TIMEZONE parameter is new in release 8 on iSeries (AS/400, System i, IBM i, ...).  The parameter allows a Domino server to adopt the timezone of the iSeries it is running on.  The value for this parameter can be set to *SYSVAL or a specific timezone setting.  If *SYSVAL is specified, the value in the iSeries system value, QTIMZON, will be used by the Domino server when setting it's timezone.  The problem is this parameter isn't working correctly.  The result when configuring a release 8.0, 8.0.1, or 8.0.2 server is that the Timezone variable in the notes.ini is set to 0.

Until this issue is addressed in release 8.0.3, your options are to either enter the correct timezone (GMT, CST, CET, ZE4, ...) when configuring the Domino server; or if you choose to specify the value *SYSVAL, you will need to edit the notes.ini of the Domino server and change the value of the Timezone variable as appropriate.  

Tomorrow I will be working with a customer to migrate their Domino environment from Linux to the iSeries.  Woo hoo!!

The Work with Domino Servers (WRKDOMSVR) command is a wonderful utility provided with the Lotus Domino server code for i5/OS.  It provides an interface to work with Domino servers in many ways.  The most commonly used features are starting, stopping, and displaying or working with the Domino console.  There are some options on the WRKDOMSVR command that are seldom used, however they provide some very helpful features.  These features aren't displayed on the main screen for this command, therefore I am finding few people know about them.

These hidden features are options 14, 15, and 16.  Option 14 is 'Work with support files'.  This option takes you directly into the IBM_TECHNICAL_SUPPORT subdirectory of the Domino server's data directory.  Option 15 is 'Work with NSDs' which takes you into the IBM_TECHNICAL_SUPPORT directory and only displays the NSD files.  Option 16 is 'Dump server call stacks'.  This option is especially helpful if you are experiencing a server hang condition or other critical issues with your Domino server.  By using option 16, call stacks are dumped for each active job running on the Domino server.  It used to be that you had to download a special utility to dump the call stacks, now it is as simple as specifying option 16 next to the Domino server!

There is one other option I would like to point out.  This one is shown on the main WRKDOMSVR screen, however I find it is not used as frequently as it could be.  This is option 9, 'Work server jobs'.  I find I use this option all the time.  I can quicly see which jobs are running on the Domino server, what their run state is, how much CPU they are consuming, and the number of threads that are active under the job.  When working with customers, I often see people switching to WRKACTJOB to see the jobs running under the Domino subsystem.  Once I show them how easy it is to get to the information they're looking for by simplying selecting option 9, they are quite pleased.

 I received a call from a customer this morning saying noone could access their mail files.  The really strange thing about the situation was that the log.nsf, names.nsf, ... could be opened.  It was just a problem with the mail files.  When users tried to open their mail files, they received the following error message.

 

"Server Error: Device is Busy/In Use"

 

The console showed messages like this for mail files the router was trying to deliver mail to:

 

"Error delivering to servername/domain mail/xxxxxxxxxxxx.nsf; Device is Busy/In Use"

 

I dumped the server call stacks for all Domino jobs on that server and the job call stacks for any jobs I thought could be suspect.  I looked through the output and didn't find anything suspicious.  Next I invoked the QP0FPTOS api to identify if there were any IFS locks on the objects. The output showed there indeed were IFS locks on the files.  I issued the RLSIFSLCK command against a few mail files.  This did no good, the objects remained locked.  The only time the RLSIFSLCK command cannot release a lock is if it is a directory lock or if there is a save lock. 

 

This tipped me off to look at the job log for the save job.  This customer takes their Domino servers down every evening, saves the data directories, and then starts the servers after the save is complete.  The save output showed that the first Domino server had been saved fine, however the save job for the second server, the server we were having this issue with, was still active.

 

Once the save job was ended, the problem went away, no server restart was required.  The mail files are able to be accessed again and the customer is very happy.

 

Now it's time to get outside and enjoy this beautiful weather since it's the weekend!

 I am very impressed with the new database property 'compress database design'.  I recently upgraded my test Domino server from 7.0.3 to 8.0.1 and played around with the 'compress database design' database property.  After doing a compact -c on the database to switch it to the new ODS, level 48, I saw this on the console:

 

Compacted mail/dadminis.nsf, 9472K bytes recovered (54%)

 

Here is a bit of a precursor to explain my test.  The mail file (dadminis.nsf) was using the Standard Mail 7 template.  It was still at ODS 43 after the upgrade.  The mail file only had 4 documents in it, so it was primarily comprised of design elements.  I set the notes.ini parameter Create_R8_Database=1 and restarted the server.  I did a 'load compact -c mail/dadminis.nsf' at the console, and got the above results, the 54% reduction in file size.

 

The size of the mail file (still the Standard Mail 7 tempate) went from 18 MB down to 8192 Kb.  Talk about a nice improvement for a base mail file.  Thank you to the Lotus team for this improvement!

 

Next on my target list is how much the database property 'compress document data' pays off.

If you are looking for information related to the program conversion on System i that happens when upgrading to V6R1, you may want to check out some recent articles I wrote.  The intention was to have one article, but it ended up being too big to fit in the space available in the magazine.  The compromise was to split it into the main article included in the magazine and two web exclusives.  Here are links to all three articles:

 

"Preparing for V6R1, What to Expect During Your Conversion"

 

"The Impact on Domino"

 

"Tips for Working With the V6R1 Conversion Tool"

 

One of the biggest gotchas, IMO, is that the program conversion tool doesn't pick up the Domino libraries by default when estimating how long the program conversion times for libraries will take.  This would be a nasty one for customer to miss, as conversion of the Domino libraries can take over an hour in some worse case scenarios.  Even worse, if the customer doesn't realize that Domino gets converted because the tool doesn't report it by default, they may not find out about the program conversion until they start the Domino servers after the upgrade to V6R1.  Because of the time required to convert the Domino libraries, the server most likely won't start and could produce some strange errors.  This would not be a fun upgrade experience. 

 

Hopefully you will find these articles helpful in planning any upgrades to V6R1.

 In a conversation with a new customer this afternoon, I heard a common theme come through; multi-versioning is not well understood.  I have had similar conversations with a number of customers over the past few years. The net is that customers do not understand what multi-versioning is and how it can benefit their Domino installations.

 

Domino on the System i (iSeries, AS/400) has had multi-versioning since releases 6.0.3 and 6.5.0.  This support allows more than one version of Lotus Domino to be installed and running on your iSeries at the same time.  For example, a single iSeries box or iSeries LPAR could have releases 6.5.6, 7.0.2, 7.0.3, and 8.0.1 installed and running. The main areas of confusion I have found related to this support in my conversations with customers are related to these three areas:

 

1) how it affects the install process

2) how servers are upgraded to the new release after the new code installation

3) do all servers have to be upgraded at the same time

 

How it affects the install process

I like to use multi-versioning support to, at a minimum, install the new version of Lotus Domino.  With multi-versioning support, I can leave production servers active while installing the new version.  This saves about 1/2 hour of downtime for the customer.  It also allows the customer the flexibility of installing the new code version during production hours, so they are ready to update their Domino servers whenever is convenient for them. 

 

How do servers get updated after the installation

There is an UPDDOMSVR (Update Domino Server) command that allows you to specify which server you want to take to the new release level.  When you are ready to update a Domino server, simply end the server and issue the UPDDOMSVR command.  The parameters to the command are the name of the Domino server and the release level you would like to upgrade the server to.  It really is that simple.

 

Do all servers have to be upgraded

This is a very simple answer, no.  You can pick and choose which servers to upgrade.  For example, if a customer has three servers sitting at releast 6.5.6 and they want to upgrade one of the servers to release 7.0.3, they have that flexibility.  Better yet, if a customer wants to check out the new release 8.0.1 that came out yesterday, then can simply install the new code release, configure a test server with this new code release, while leaving their existing servers untouched.

 

Multi-versioning is really that simple!