Lotus Nut

This actually applies to all Standard versions of Notes and, really, any other Eclipse-based app that has tons of files installed.

Get Defraggler. Now.

Then use it to defrag your Notes folder. After uninstalling an 8.5 Beta and installing 8.0.2 Gold, there were over 2,000 fragmented files in my Notes path! If you want to scrounge every bit of performance out of Notes, you should defrag the folder. Sure, Notes 8.0.2 will load faster without doing this, but fragmentation is a performance killer - especially on slower laptop drives. Defraggler, and some other tools I'm sure, provide the ability to do this. You can defrag single or multiple files (ahem, VM images) or highlight the path the file is in and defrag all files in that path. This gives you a rather quick defrag without having to wait for the entire drive to be defragged.

I first posted this to my Blogspot blog. The most recent update is for a specific DWA 7 error - and I'm planning on adding some stuff from DWA 8. This post generally ranks high on my search engine hits, so I like to keep it updated from time to time. Hopefully it's helping people get these issues resolved. If you know of a resolution that's not listed, please let me know! This first entry is one that happens pretty frequently. An alternate title could be "iNotes Warning" from previous versions. This document contains two sections. One is a general information section and the other is a section on steps to correct the error(hopefully). Please see the bottom for a change log.

General Information:

The full error message is:
"Microsoft Internet Explorer Domino Web Access Warning. Sorry, we were unable to process your request at this time. If you are unable to continue working in your mail file, please dismiss this warning and then select View, Refresh from your browser's menu."

In Domino Web Access (DWA) 7.0 and higher, there is a new error message that reads "The installation of Domino Web Access 7 Control has been blocked or declined by the user. Do you want to use this on subsequent Domino Web Access pages?" A specific correction for this can be to ensure that the user has at least Power-User authority. Another possible correction is to simply add the DWA server to Internet Explorer's Trusted sites zone.

IBM has two technotes regarding this:

Prompt: 'Installation of Domino Web Access 7 Control has been blocked by the user. Do you want to use Subsequent Domino Web Access Pages?'. This alludes to the DWA7w.cab file being moved or corrupted on the DWA server or even that the default HTML directory has been changed from domino\html. I have notified them that in my experience, this may come up when the DWA server isn't in the trusted sites zone for IE.

Can the Domino Web Access ActiveX Upload Control (iNotes Class) be manually placed on a workstation? While not directly related to the error message, this contains a table of the behaviour of DWA with and without the ActiveX control installed.

Corrective Actions:

Recently, the top two on the following list have been what we have seen to cause more issues. If the computers are external (employees' home PC), then I would definitely bank on them having spyware.

- Disable Pop-Up blocker
- Clean up spyware (use application such as Spybot and/or AdAware)
- Add DWA server to Internet Explorer's Trusted Sites zone (this may be a good idea for any other intranet servers or via an Active Directory policy)
- Clear out Java Cache by running C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_0X\bin\javacpl.exe
---Click “Delete Files” then click “OK”.
---*if there are different versions, do this for each version or uninstall older versions and leave only the newest copy.
- Clear out Windows temp folders.
--- C:\Temp--- C:\Documents and Settings\USER PROFILE\Local Settings\Temp
--- C:\Documents and Settings\USER PROFILE\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
--- C:\Winnt\Temp
--- *Clear out the Temp/Temp. Internet Files for each user listed in the Documents and Settings folder.
- Reset IE to default settings.
--- Right Click on the Internet Explorer icon on the desktop or go to Control Panel and open Internet Options.
--- Click on the Programs Tab. Then click the Reset Web Settings button. Uncheck
“Also reset my home page” then click “OK”.
- Tools > Internet Options > Advanced > Disable "Use HTTP 1.1" (you may need to enable it because sometimes IE just doesn't like the setting. I have actually seen it start working by enabling this option.)
- Tools > Internet Options > Advanced > Disable "Do not save encrypted pages to disk"
- Download the MSXML 4.0 SP2. This link will get you to the download. I selected the msxml.msi.
- Clear Browser Cache
- Delete iNotes or Domino Web Access class file
- If one is currently installed, upgrade to the latest Sun JVM
- Windows Update (also verify that a recent Windows Update has not broken this!)
- Load Convert, Fixup, Updall, and Compact against the mailfile
- Reboot
- Defrag
- Run a tool such as Symantec/Norton WinDoctor

Change Log:
08/14/2006: Added information regarding Java Cache, Temp Folders, and Resetting IE defaults.
04/14/2006: Added information regarding technotes 1228480 and 1161877.
Added comment to Windows Update line to state that a recent update may be causing the problem. I have personally seen this in 2004 and the link in the text above is from April 2006.

In response to: What is your typical database maintenance routine?

Regarding Compact, I had an entry I posted a while back related to fragmentation and compacting. In that, I actually recommended using something like a load compact -c +10. We all know that fragmentation causes very poor performance. However, defragging causes the databases to be even more fragmented because every new write will likely be to a non-contiguous block on the drive. I've been pondering this a lot more lately and thinking that allowing the 10% white space (like you mentioned) is actually a good idea. Something could even be accomplished by some code to add data to a database and then delete it so that there's white space. Then defragmenting that database (using something like defraggler, you can choose to just defrag a single file at a time) will yield a contiguous space that will not become fragmented very quickly. This, coupled with archiving, I believe can be a pretty good boost in i/o performance. I'm cross-posting this comment at my blog too for further thoughts...

Yeah, David beat me to it! I think there were a lot of concerns with previous versions related to DB integrity. So we still see a good many customers still running fixups fairly regularly (more than once per week). I don't guess this would hurt, but it would definitely cause a good bit of overhead for something that's pretty unnecessary.

I would like to inform you of a new blogger - Chad Scott. From his introductory post:


Chad also has a post related to some Issues in Notes and Domino 8.0.1 and how IBM is handling them.

Welcome Chad!

Or "Here are some new features provided by Lotus Connections 2.0"... I think it's pretty awesome that there are 173 blogs hosted here - though most of you need to post a little more frequently!! But for those of you who stay on top of blogging, Connections 2.0 has a lot of nice updates to the Blogs service. The lists below are not exhaustive, but represent many of the new features.

Blogs Home - this feature has been significantly enhanced with extra views and a cleaner presentation of the data.

• Defaults to the most recent entries, but you can sort with various criteria - title, recommendations, comments, visits.
• Display summary (just title) or detail (first ~250 characters of body).
• On the left, you can also browse to All Blogs and My Recommendations.
• Blog Subscriptions - hover over these to either subscribe to Entries or Comments in your browser or by adding them to a Community.
• On the right are links to Featured Blog Entries, Most Recommended, Most Commented, and Most Visited.

Blog Authoring

• If you are a member of a multi-authored blog, you may choose which blog to post to more easily.
• Going into html editing mode, you may embed content from online services, such as YouTube.
• Preview the post before publishing it.
• Embedding images is now much simpler with a "wizard" instead of just entering a URL (to your own upload directory, usually). This will allow you upload directly from your computer, recent photos, or a URL. You may also choose the layout and size of the image and make the settings default. To me, this is very reminiscent of the Blogger upload functionality.

Commenting

• Comments are now in ascending order (like all good blogs should be)! This was one of the biggest complaints from the community and one of the first "issues" we noticed when setting up the site back in December.
• Much-improved comment previewing system. This was also a big complaint because you would have to go "back" in the browser in order to modify what you were previewing. Now, it is all inline.
• Have you ever wanted to cross-post a comment to your own blog? This is now possible using the "Add this comment to my own blog" option!

Etc...

• At the bottom of each blog post is a "Notify Others" option which allows you to select other registered BleedYellow users to send a link to the post you're currently viewing.
• Also at the bottom of each post is a "Flag as inappropriate"
• PlanetLotus "support". There were some formatting issues that prevented direct Connections 1.0.2 feeds from being used at PlanetLotus (you could use FeedBurner, though, which is probably a better idea - allowing you to track subscribers). This has been corrected with Connections 2.0. For the feed you submit to PlanetLotus, you need to use the following format: http://www.bleedyellow.com/blogs/roller-ui/rendering/feed/lotusnut/entries/rss (the default link is "/atom" at the end - Yancy Lent has found that /rss will work with the PlanetLotus feed system!! Thanks Yancy!
  

Funny story - after compiling this list I decided to see if there is a similar list in the InfoCenter, and there is. I believe I actually caught everything except for the AutoSave feature (which I have set for 3 minutes).

After much lab testing, we felt that it was a good time to upgrade BleedYellow to Connections 2.0. As you may have noticed, the site is now Blue. This is the default style for Connections. We are currently in the process of painting it yellow again so that you can see the transformation.

Most of my past week was devoted to testing this upgrade in the lab. After working with IBM and some YellowBleeders, we found that all components (except the forum) were fully operational. But we all know that sometimes success in the lab does not translate into pruduction success. We have seen a few things go wrong with this upgrade. We have encountered an issue with the new Homepage and will be adding that feature shortly. Unfortunately, we have also run into an error with Communities after the upgrade. We're hard at work with IBM to get that resolved. The other known issue is an error message after sending colleague invitations. The invitations do go through and the recipient can accept them, but there is an error when you send it. Feel free to use this feature and disregard the error. We will get that sorted out as well.

So, have fun with the updates to the various features. More on those later...

During the evening of Saturday, August 9, 2008 we will have some scheduled downtime for maintenance of all BleedYellow services.

 

Also, Sametime shouldn't be down for very long.

 

Thank you for your patience...

 

Cross-posted at BleedYellow Site Feedback