Urs Meli

 In the last 4-5 weeks I noticed more and more crashes.

I switch a lot between Id's, open and close the desigern and admin client several times. Sometimes nsd fires after switching id's or after saving a form or out of the blue....

I removed all plugins and widgets and even with them removed the crashes happen.

Anyone noticed the same behaviour?

Today I was struggling with LDAP.

The Domino Server has directory assistance over 2 address books activated.

Problem: Got LDAP error 50 - authentication error and only the users from the second adressbook were visible.

Always got the same problem, even with administrator credentials.

After checking the default domain config document, both addressbook's ACL's, directory assistance and searching the internet I found an interesting ini setting:
On the server console: set config ldapdebug=7
turns ldap debugging on.
Connecting with the LDAP administrator user I saw a strange message like "User CN=XYZ has no read access to names.nsf" on the console.
But the user was in the ACL (Manager) and could open the names.nsf in the notes client.

Comparing the 2 adressbooks I discovered that in names.nsf the "maximum internet name and password" was set to "No Access".
After changeing it to reader, everything worked!

I always thought that this "Maximum Internet name and password" setting was for http access only.





 

I'm using  julian's openlog as much as possible. I'ts very easy to implement in existing applications. I extended it, so Openlog will configure itself from a profiledocument. So I can easily turn logging on and off and configure where to log to.
One issue I had lately, was in a distributed environment. the customer complained about lots of connections to one server from users far away (users from japan connecting to a swiss server). It turned out, that they were all connecting to central openlog database.
After turning the logging completely off, the connections dropped.
What's the best practice for logging? Central logging database, where many databases log to or every database has it's integrated logfile?
I think it depends on the customers infrastructure. If it's a simple environment with fast connections and only one or two locations a centralized logfile is great.
If it's highly distributed company with lots of branch offices and branch servers with slow connections between it.
A central logfile can become complicated to maintain (prevent the spoke servers from pulling the log data from the hub). The logfile has to be on each server to prevent users from connecting to servers far, far away.

I'll try to implement the following strategy:

1. . Integrated Openlog into the application ( 1 view and 2 form's should be easily integrated in most applications)
2.  write as much debug calls as possible in my code.
3.  when going life, just turn the debugging off and log only errors (so nothing should be logged after all :-) or aren't you perfect?)
4. clean to logfile on a regular basis (14d)
   

 Today I ran into an issue with profiledocuments under 8.0.1.
A notes "intranet portal" (multi-server) application developed for 6.5 worked as stable as it was designed.
A year after the server and client upgrade to 8.0.1 some strange errors occure. Systemprofile documents get lost, can't access userprofile fields.

The application loads 3 forms into a frameset. These forms have all a location field wich basically makes a @getprofilefield("Userprofile";"CurrentLocation";@username). This works fine.
Inside one frame, the user can open another notes form with the same location field. The second location field doesn't get the @getprofilefield. It's just empty....
After some navigating through the application and getting back to the startpage, the form with the empty field suddenly has the field filled with the correct value.
And I thought that only writing to profiledocuments can be troublesome.....

Think I have to replace the profiledocuments with real notes documents. Because tests with 8.5.1 revealed the same issue.


Does anyone still use profiledocuments in 8? or does anybody have similar problems with profile documents?

 A few day's ago I had to write 3 simple webagents to set some field: status, username and time/date.
Before ELSE (Eclipse Lotus Script Editor) I would write 3 webagents with almost the same code:

public sub webagent1
dim s as notessession
dim context as notesdocument
set s = new notessession
set context = s.documentcontext
call context.replaceitemvalue("Status","3")
...
...
end sub

and for the second agent:

public sub webagent2
dim s as notessession
dim context as notesdocument
set s = new notessession
set context = s.documentcontext
call context.replaceitemvalue("Status","3")
...
...
end sub

Lots of duplicate code.
With ELSE I changed the code to use classes.

Public Class WebagentClass
private s as notessession
private context as notesdocument
private username as string
public sub new()

set me.s=new notessession
set me.context =s.documentcontext
me.username =s.effectiveusername

end sub

public sub webAgent1()

 call me.context.replaceitemvalue("Status","3")
call me.context.save(true)

end sub
public sub webAgent2()

call me.context.replaceitemvalue("Status","4")
call me.context.replaceitemvalue("Editor",me.username)
call me.context.save(true,false)

end sub
end Class

 Just upgraded an older notebook. PCG-V505cp, 1.6GHz Pentium M.

It's from 2005. It had a 40Gb HD and 1GB Ram, and 12" display. I upgraded it to 160GB Hd and 2 GB Ram. It runs very smoothly with windows xp. The extended battery still lasts more than 5 hours. The Notebook is fast enough for emailing and websurfing. Tomorrow I'm gonna test the notes 8.5.1 client with it.

Today I encountered a strange problem. A document had an item named "ServerName" in it. I was able to edit this field.
The users were not.
ACL was correct. I'm a manager and the users are authors and they can edit the rest of the document except this particular field.
Checking the form, the security option "Must have at least Editor access...." was not set.
The strange thing was when I edited the document or refreshed it, the item flas changed to summary. When the users tried to save the document
the item was changed back to summary protected.
I found this document on the ibm site. The database is accessed via directory assistance.

So I changed the fieldname to servername_edit and everything worked well....

Sometimes, Lotus Notes is strange.....

 Just found that article about"duct tape programming"

Are notes developers like duct tape programmers?

After the upgrade to Windows 7, I lost some passwords which I stored in the firefox password manager.
After searching through the internet I found the KeePass utility.
The nice thing about KeePass is, that there are clients available for Linux, mac, J2ME, Android, BlackBerry, IPhone.
I try to collect all my password in this utility. If my notebook crashes. I got at least all my passwords.

After poor networkperformance <2kb/s with my internetconnection I had to turn autotuning off.

Turn autotuning off

This weekend I updated my windows XP to Windows 7 Enterprise or should I say "migrated" ?
There's no updatepath from xp to 7 so I tried the easy transfer tool (ett).

The ett copied about 32GB of data from XP into a migration file and back to windows 7.
This saved my domain account and all my data from this account. All the cool stuff (Thunderbird, Firefox) have lost the my profiles and I have to restore them manually.
Windows 7 kept the filepermissions from XP. So without my domain account, lots of stuff wouldn't run anymore.

Most of my software is now useless and I have to install almost everything from scratch. Except Lotus Notes.

All my older relases R5, R6 and R7 run. Even my Notes 8.5 FP1 runs without problems. I can even use Windows 7 to work again :-)

First impression: faster than expected.

I'm Preparing my notebook for windows 7. I plan to uprade this weekend.
1. remove all unnecessary stuff.
2. make a backup image
3. upgrade from windows xp to windows 7

Hope my Lenovo T61P will survive, or at least let me restore the backup....

Today I downloaded the Sametime Unified Call Server (CZ3E0ML) and Sametime Unified Connect Server (CZ3E3ML) from the Business Partner Site.
Thought that I would be able to test the installtion and configuration a bit. But no chance.

It strange. I can download the software, but I'm not allowed to test it.
Seems that it has to be some kind of rocket science to implement  Sametime Unified Telephony.
Does that mean, that it is also rocket science to run this box?

Hope there will be more details on how to install SUT. So we could try to sell it....