 Anthony Holmes | Anthony Holmes 23 August 2010 09:12:22 PMNotes Domino 8.5.2 will be released shortly. Does it have an unusually high number of fixes? The Fix List currently shows 1498 fixes. A quick look shows that only 8.0.1 had a larger total number fixes (with 2156). So it seems like a lot. But Maintenance Releases are not released on a regular basis, so the raw totals can be misleading. Here's a breakdown that takes the time between releases into account. First, the raw number of fixes in each Maintenance Release (disregarding the Fix Packs) look like this:  When we factor in the number of days between each Maintenance Release, the number of "fixes per day" looks like this:  This second chart provides a rather different impression: 7.0.2 and 8.0.1 were the releases with a "big" number of collected "fixes per day". Perhaps you can over analyse this data.... maybe 7.0.1 only had the high urgency fixes, and routine ones were held over for 7.0.2 released quite soon after - so it has an "unfair" spike. Logic suggests that there were a good chunk of fixes that needed to be delivered after the substantially new 8.0.0 Eclipse client arrived, via 8.0.1. But it seems that things have settled down towards a more usual pattern following 8.5.0's release. 8.5.2 is closer to the long term average, (but nonetheless, it's still just a little higher). Here's my raw data (using exact release dates for the recent releases, and the 1st of the month for the older releases, and dd/mm/yy formatted dates). Feel free to comment if I've made any silly mistakes in compiling the stats.  UPDATE: Typo corrected 10:54pm 2010-08-23 Original wording of third sentence originally incorrectly referred to 8.0.2 instead of 8.0.1. Anthony Holmes 12 August 2010 01:22:48 PMI watched a Techline event on the topic "The future of email" today. The video replay can be found here. It was hosted by James O'Loghlin and had a panel of Alistair Rennie (General Manager, IBM Lotus), Genevieve Bell (Intel) and Adele Beachley (RIM) and Mark Pesce (futurist), . There was a wide ranging discussion. Here are a couple of things that struck a cord with me:
Dealing with information overload Mark Pesce quoted Clay Shirky who said "It's not information overload. It's Filter Failure." That comment strikes a cord with one of the stated aims of IBM's Project Vulcan: In the future you will have a river of information coming in, through your inbox, instant messages, activities, defined workflow applications, tweets... and instead of having an overloaded inbox, you will filter that flow into small streams that are focused on the tasks you need to complete. Filter it to look at information related to a project. Then filter it to only see information related to a customer. Then filter it to look at work processes you need to complete.
Email is a Pavlovian Addiction This was another comment by Mark Pesce. The "New mail" message is like a bell to one of Pavlov's dogs. It signals the possibility of a reward. Even though you are disappointed most of the time (there's no food or the latest email isn't valuable), the psychology draws you back again and again because sometimes there is something good. The first step to controlling that addiction is to recognise that it exists. (So I've set myself the goal of completing this blog posting without flicking to my email..... arghh.. it's killing me!)
Documents vs Ephemera One of the audience made the comment that whether something arrived via email, instant messaging or twitter, some things are like "documents": they contain pieces of information. Others are transitory ("Yes I'd love to come to lunch".) You deal with these things differently. Alistair Rennie extended on this, and said that they key then becomes to ensure that Documents have their full value. I see this added value already through IBM's use of Connections. Previously documents sat on hard drives or in emails. Finding them by file name was difficult. Finding the right version of a document was even harder. When I search for a document on the IBM Intranet, I'm always much happier when I find possible matches in IBM Lotus Connections' Files because it gives me context to any document I might be interested in: - What tags does the document have? (Chosen by the author and others)
- Who wrote the document? (Profile information about them)
- Who else has read the document (and how many people)?
- What comments have people made about it?
- Which version am I looking at? (Is this definitely the newest version? If I want, can I get a previous version?)
- If I take a copy, can I be notified if it gets updated?
The value of Lotus Connections is often not fully apparent if you simple watch a presentation (or if all you know about it is that someone has said "It's like Facebook for the enterprise.") Using it makes a difference. The Files feature quite simple, yet really cool. Alistair Rennie also made the comment that we should stop thinking about the Transport Mechanism (Email, Instant Messaging, Facebook) and start thinking about the outcomes that you need to achieve.  A photo I took of Rollason's Falls at Mount Buffalo, Victoria, Australia. (Symbolising the 'river' of new messages that reach us from email, instant messaging, twitter, etc..) Anthony Holmes 7 June 2010 11:25:46 AMHere's a quick tip on how to work out which release of the Embedded Sametime client you are using (or any other Notes Feature/Plug-in). Two minutes before I attended a meeting this morning, I noticed that the organiser had announced the meeting was being held with Sametime 8.5, and he suggested that we have the embedded Sametime 8.5.1 client installed with Notes. I have four different Notes installations that I use regularly, and I couldn't remember whether I had upgraded Sametime on the machine I was using. It didn't really matter, because I could attend the meeting via a browser, but nevertheless I tried to find out what version I was running. First I looked for a version number by clicking on the Sametime logo and the "Open in new Window" etc. control. But there was no version number. Then I went into Sametime's Preferences screen (which is integrated with Notes' Preferences). But there was no version number. Finally, I clicked on Help; About Lotus Notes (in Windows) (Lotus Notes; About IBM Lotus Notes in Macintosh):  Then I clicked on Feature Details, which showed me Sametime 8.5.1 (actually 8.5.1.2010527-1830, which tells me that the person who compiled this build was probably working a little bit late that night.):  If I click on Plug-in Details, I get a different list of items and version numbers:  Features are a collection of Plug-ins that are packaged together, so they are generally more elaborate than Plug-ins. See this article for a description. One final point: if you are running the Domino Administrator, you don't see the Feature/Plug-in/Configuration details buttons when you look at About. You need to do it from the Notes client. Anthony Holmes 24 May 2010 12:39:10 PMHere's a summary of how incremental backup programs use Transaction Logs. The behaviour of point in time restores should be very predictable (although one restore might be very different to another depending upon the time since the last full backup and the time selected for the restore, and what happened on the server during that time frame). This behaviour isn't significantly different between Domino 7 and 8, except if you have turned on the Domino Attachment Object Service. Here's the theory about a point in time restoration: You select what needs to be restored, and when through the Backup product's interface. Let's say you decide to restore a database called ABC.NSF as at 1pm Friday 21st May 2010. The Backup software finds the last full backup of ABC.NSF. Let's assume that it was a 1GB database backed up at 10pm on Sunday 16th May 2010. - The backup software reads off the tape(s) that backed up that server at the time of the last full backup. There may be 500GB of files in that backup. It will read through some or all of that 500GB to find ABC.NSF.
- ABC.NSF has a record of the last Transaction Log ID and Sequence Number that applied at the moment of the full backup (This is recorded as part of its Database Instance ID).
- The backup program will then need to read through every transaction log between the moment ABC.NSF was backed up on Sunday until 1pm Friday 21st May 2010. It doesn't matter that you are only restoring one database: every single transaction log between the last full backup and the restore point will need to be read off tape and written to hard disk. The version of ABC.NSF will record (in its DBIID) that the last Transaction Log prior at the time of backup was (say) S000500.TXN.
- The backup program then reads through every transaction that happened on the server looking for changes to ABC.NSF. More specifically, it looks for transactions labelled with ABC.NSF's DBIID number. These are replayed and written in chronological order so that ultimately ABC.NSF is identical to the way ABC.NSF appeared at the point in time... S0000501.TXN, S0000502.TXN, S0000503.TXN etc..
- The volume of transaction records that needs to be restored to disk is exactly equal to the volume of transaction logs backed up between the last full backup and the point of restore time.
- For most days, the number of Transaction Log files written per day will be fairly similar. But it might spike if there is an unusually large volume of work: eg a Design Replace of all mail files, or an email with a 20MB attachment sent to 1000 people on a server that isn't running DAOS.
- The backup programs call the Domino Backup API, which has a small set of commands on how to read from a Transaction Log and write to a .NSF. The logic of the Domino Backup API is quite simple.
Incremental vs Full Backups: Pros/Cons, Consequences Incremental backups give you huge benefits in terms of faster backup times. It also lets you run backups more than once each day (so you don't need to squeeze it into a window of time overnight). You get point in time restores as another benefit. There are two prices you pay for this: Restores are significantly slower than from a full backup, especially if the full backups are infrequent. If faster backup/restores are needed, Domino can easily provide them through appropriate infrastructure. Just as Exchange provides its Volume Shadow Copy service that uses redundant storage to take a copy that is then backed up, Domino allows you to run a cluster server specifically for backup purposes (or dual purpose high availability and backups). The backup server is then fully backed up on a frequent basis using more frequent full backups and fewer incremental backups, allowing faster restorations. For both Exchange VCS and Domino Replica Server backup, there's a (similar) additional hardware cost to provide a higher service level. Another thing that you can do to speed the restore times is to ensure that the size of your transaction log drive is sufficient to comfortably store the full range of Transaction Logs between your last full backup time and the time of the restoration. That way the Transaction Logs will still be on the Transaction Log drive and only the .NSF will need to be read from the last full backup. There will be no need to retrieve Transaction Log files from tape. (The transactions will still need to be read off hard disk and replayed, which may still take some time. But will be much faster then restoring them from tape as well.) Anthony Holmes 10 May 2010 11:46:46 AMThis is a high level overview of Notes Client upgrade considerations and options. Installing Notes Clients The setup program with Lotus Notes performs a number of tasks: as well as laying down the necessary files, it checks for previous installations of Notes and Registry entries to ensure you aren't left with a 'mixed' installation. If a Notes.ini file is present, obsolete settings may be removed. Although some people publish workarounds to have different releases of Notes installed on the same PC, this should not be done as part of a standard installation. The setup program is designed to protect you against the instability caused by mixed releases and inappropriate configuration settings. Therefore, your default position should be to 'install' Notes, rather than copying images to a PC some other way.
Ways of initiating Setup There are a number of ways of initiating a Notes installation. These are different ways of initiating a proper installation. All of these methods are supported: - Launching setup.exe
- Using Smartupgrade
- Upgrade by Mail Deployment and
- Running of the Notes installation by a software deployment and packaging systems like Tivoli Provisioning Manager, Microsoft SMS.
Each of these methods will install either the standard installation package, or a customised version of that package.
Install Shield The Notes setup client is an installation package created using InstallShield. It is possible to re-configure the Notes installation for a number of reasons: - To provide responses to installation questions so that users aren't prompted
- To pre-select which features will and won't be installed
- To change aspects of the installation from the default: for example, to use different directories
- To deploy different files, or to change the default notes.ini
- To pre-configure information, for example, details of the Update site to be used in this organisation
- To install additional plug-ins etc.
This reconfiguration is done using the InstallShield tuner for Lotus Notes. This is a version of InstallShield's more general packaging software, locked so that it can re-configure Notes installations but cannot be used for other software. The Installshield Tuner for Lotus Notes can be obtained from IBM Passport Advantage. An excellent description of Notes client package customisation can be found here:
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/dx/Notes_Installation_Package_Customization
PC Images Rather than running Setup every time you get a new PC, you may want to simply lay down an entire PC image. For normal Notes installations (installing on PCs that are already deployed) laying down an image of the Notes directories alone would not be supported. The Setup program must be given its opportunity to make decisions about which Registry entries need to be added and deleted, and to check for older versions of Notes. On a brand new PC that is to serve as the image for a wide deployment of PCs to an organisation, you might - with care - create an image that is reused on other new PCs. With the base PC, you would install the Operating System and other programs. You would then install Notes: either using the standard Setup, or one that you had tuned. Note: If you install Notes manually, you should keep a record of the installation choices you made so that you can repeat the process if a new image later needs to be created for new hardware or a new Operating System release. If you use a tuned installation, you should keep that tuned package for later use if needed.
Important Note: You must ONLY install Notes. You must NOT start Notes on the base PC. If you start Notes on the Base PC, it will start to configure Notes. This means that it will create files like the Personal Address Book (names.nsf) and Bookmarks. Some of these files will be Notes databases that will have a replica ID. If you have personal files in an environment with the same replica ID it can cause the inappropriate merging and loss of data. For example, if two users have Personal Address Books with unrelated (personal) contacts, they may merge if they ever replicate or appear on the same server. This might happen if you ever replicated a Personal Address Book to a server (to make it available to other people, for backup reasons, or as part of Roaming or Blackberry configuration). Even if you don't currently intend to do this, it is risky to have personal configuration databases in an environment with common replica IDs. In summary: If you are creating a Base PC, that will be used as an image for deploying PCs, run the installation of Notes but do not start Notes. When you come to deploy copies of the Base PC to users, you can then start Notes on the copies and place ID files etc. onto the PCs that are being deployed. This could be done manually by copying files, with batch scripts specific to your environment or by using features like the ID Vault.
Other tools One way of bypassing the running of the Notes setup tool entirely might be to use a tool that manages changes to the Registry. For example:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/regshot/ This tool is designed to capture changes in registry entries. Note that there might be dangers in (for example) taking a snapshot of the Registry for an existing Notes 6 installation, installing Notes 8.5, and then assuming you have captured all the changes that you might need for any PC in your environment being upgraded from Notes 6 to Notes 8.5. Some of your Notes 6 PCs may have registry entries that weren't present in your test upgrade samples. (For example, some PCs may have had Notes 6 Designer installed, or may have additional entries present because they were upgraded from Notes 5, while others had Notes 6 as the first version installed on the PC.) If you bypass the running of the Notes 8.5 setup program by other means, you need to be very careful to ensure that you get a proper installation. Generally it is safer if Setup is run on the PC, or if it was properly used to create a base image.
Managing Future Upgrades Teams managing Notes client upgrades often focus on the goal of deploying a single release of Notes (for example: "this project is deploying Notes 8.5.1FP1"), and don't spend a relatively small amount of time agreeing on how to manage subsequent upgrades (for example, Notes 8.5.2). The ideal time to consider this is while the upgrade is being planned and deployed. All the relevant parties are engaged and thinking about Notes during the upgrade. It need not be expensive or difficult to provide subsequent upgrades. It simply needs to be decided who will do it and how they will do it. The teams that look after packaging are often focused on the Operating System, and don't have any responsibility for items that may be fixed or usability improvements that come with updates to the Notes client code. Sometimes the Notes/Domino team aren't members of the packaging group. There should either be a simple way that the Notes/Domino team can engage the packaging groups when necessary, or, the Notes/Domino team should be given the ability to manage the deployment of Notes software themselves using the Smartupgrade facility that is able to deploy Notes client upgrades as part of a 'business as usual' activity. Notes client upgrades need not be expensive and infrequent. They should be routine and happen as often as needed. Anthony Holmes 4 March 2010 03:11:14 PMIt has been taking some time for all of the benefits of IBM's decision to build Notes 8.5 within an Eclipse framework to become clear. The most obvious benefit was the greatly modernised look and feel of Notes 8.x. But while it might have been helpful to use Eclipse to modernise Notes, it probably wasn't necessary: the old client code could probably have been revamped without using Eclipse. Eclipse also allowed Notes to be much more extensible. Eclipse comes with a Plug-in architecture. Some of the basic features of Notes 8.x are provided via Plug-ins that IBM writes and ships as a core part of the product. But we also allow Plug-ins developed by others to extend Notes. The obvious place to do this is on the side bar on the right hand side of the screen, where features like the RSS reader and Sametime appear. But this isn't the only place that programmers can use Plug-ins to extend what Notes can do. A good example of a Plug-in that gets outside of the Side Bar is the 3D History Thumbnail Viewer that many of you may already have seen:  It displays a full screen History of the pages that you have viewed in Notes. It's much more intuitive than the simple History list that IBM gives you out of the box (a simple drop down list of page titles). Thumbnail images of windows you looked at previously fly past you in a way that makes it very easy to flip back to a page or view you looked at recently. With previous releases of Notes (and most other closed products) it would have been impossible to radically upgrade the interface of a piece of software without major open heart surgery and a lot of luck. With Notes 8.5 there's an open, supportable way of doing it. People can get these updates pushed out to them, or subscribe via Update sites. If there is a problem with a Plug-in, there's a nice managed way to remove the Plug-in. (A much safer way than than trying to remove the types of backdoor hacking used to deploy any code changes with products that don't have an Eclipse style Plug-in architecture). I expect we are going to start to see many more Plug-ins that live outside the Sidebar in the future. A lot of imaginative programmers are starting to think outside the box. Anthony Holmes 6 February 2010 05:49:20 PMAs somebody who works for IBM, I've almost entirely stopped using MS Office. However I've been flipping between Symphony 1.x, OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice for a while, and not entirely settled on any of them. Company loyalty to IBM meant that I'd often use Symphony, especially when working on presentations and documents that I was going to share with other IBMers. But for some work an most personal use I've generally used Open Office 3. After a couple of days using IBM Lotus Symphony 3 (Beta 2), I'm developing confidence that this is likely to become my preferred Office product. Here's why: My key feature: Text documents can now be displayed with two (or more) pages shown side by side:  This feature has existed for some time in OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice, so Symphony isn't doing anything new here. But I've got a large, wide, high resolution screen. Being able to see the flow of my documents is important to me. Until Symphony obtained this feature I was always likely to be unhappy using it as a word processor. This was the first thing I looked at when I installed Symphony 3, and I was very happy to see that it is now available.
Sidebar In addition, there's something in Symphony that I think make it even better than OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice. Specifically, I'm thinking about the Sidebar controls. These provide a unified interface for functions that are done with three different interfaces in Open Office. (Toolbars, dialogs and a funny non-standard pane.) The Sidebars follow the convention used in the Lotus Notes 8.x interface of placing some items in a peripheral vision location. Things that you will need occasionally sit off to the edge. I believe that this has been developed as a result of usability testing. Changing Text properties is handled two different ways in Open Office: - Toolbar icons (which are squashed into a narrow line, instead of being laid out in the more usable format used by Symphony's Text Properties control) or
- With a Modal Text Properties Dialog (where you need to select your Text/Paragraph etc., bring up the Modal Dialog, and then make your changes before pressing OK. A tedious and distracting approach.)
For those who like Toolbars and Modal Text Dialogs, these still exist in Symphony. But with the wide screens that are becoming the norm these days, the Symphony Sidebar approach works well. There is a nicely laid out set of controls on the right hand side (that can be opened or compressed). It has layout space that make it simpler to find things (like the Modal Text Properties Dialog), but unlike the Text Properties Dialog, you're not forced to press OK in order to go back to editing your document: you can switch quickly between editing your text and changing properties. (**See the bottom for why I don't like modal dialogs).  In Open Office, Clip Art becomes visible when you select Tools; Gallery. This then opens a window stuck between your toolbars and your document that doesn't look like anything else you see in the interface. (This is the "funny non-standard pane" I mentioned above.) It's a bit obscure to know where to turn it on (it's not in the Edit, Format or Insert menus), and when it is turned on it's inconsistently placed. By contrast it's easy to see where to turn on the Symphony Clip Art, and when it is enabled it appears in the same place as the other Sidebar controls:  The other two default Sidebar controls are Styles and Navigator. In Open Office these open as (thankfully non-modal) floating windows. If that's what you prefer, you can also drag them away from the Sidebar in Symphony and they turn into floating windows. But the down side of floating windows is that they are quite likely to obscure the text you are trying to edit. That is counter productive. In Open Office they can't be docked. I prefer the Symphony approach of having a consistent place on the edge for them to sit that doesn't obscure text.
**Why I don't like Modal Dialog Boxes As Wikipedia describes it, "Non-modal or Modeless dialog boxes are used when the requested information is not essential to continue, and so the window can be left open while work continues elsewhere". Formatting text is a classic case where non-modal dialogs simply make sense.  For those who haven't seen it, this is the non-modal Text Properties in Lotus Notes: it lets you easily assign text properties without having to switch modes (and press OK) all the time. Tabbed Windows and Tags (originally called Categories in Notes) were features that Notes pioneered that eventually stormed the rest of the PC interface world. Non-modal dialogs already exist in some software, but I hope that they will become more popular. Anthony Holmes 21 January 2010 05:20:06 PMHere is some information about the cluster.ncf file that is created for any server or client that makes a connection to a cluster. Whenever a server that is a member of a cluster is accessed, Notes records information about all the servers in the cluster, so that it can try to fail over to other cluster members in the future if the original server is ever unavailable. Domino servers do the same thing when they contact other servers in clusters. The information about all the servers in the cluster is (I believe) kept in RAM, but it also gets written to a file called cluster.ncf. It's documented that this is actually written to cluster.ncf when the Notes client is shut down. The fact that the file contains a ". ncf" extension might lead you to suspect that is is a form of Notes database (like ".nsf", ".ntf", ".ndk"...). But if you try to open it in Notes, you can't. That's because cluster.ncf is a simple text file. You can open it in Notepad or any other text editor. Here's a sample cluster.ncf file, showing information about a single cluster of servers: Time=11/10/2007 03:15:21 PM (CA257371:001760C4) HomeCluster CN=Server1A/O=Org CN=Server1B/O=Org In this case the first line give information about the time the cluster information was picked up by the Notes client. On the left hand side it's in simple text: "Time=11/10/2007 03:15:21 PM". The text value is imprecise and ambiguous: is it 10th November or 11th October? Would things break if someone switched their Regional Settings from US to almost anywhere else in the world? What time zone was in use when this time was recorded? The information in brackets gives more precise information: (CA257371:001760C4) This hex information isn't a DocumentID, replica ID or UNID. Instead it is time and date information. Translated it says "Time Zone: 10 Hours East of Greenwich, with DST, Year: 2007, Month: October, Day: 11th; Time Hour: 15 (with DST)/Time Hour: 14 (without DST), Minute: 15, Second: 21, Ticks (sixtieths) of a second: 00 Information about how to decode these numbers can be found here: How to Interpret the Hexadecimal values in a Time/Date value http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg27003019 The second line of the cluster.ncf gives the name of the cluster: HomeCluster The third and fourth lines give the names of all the cluster members in the cluster, whether or not the user has yet had the need to connect to them. If there were four servers in the cluster, then all four servers would be listed here. In this case the user has definitely connected to Server1A. They may or may not have ever connected to Server1B, but if Server1A is ever unavailable, the Notes client will know where to go. If this person connected to other clusters, the cluster.ncf file would contain additional Time; Cluster Name; Cluster Member Name(s) appended to the file. As always, many thanks to the customer who asked me about clustering and cluster.ncf. It gave me a good reason to have a look at the nuts and bolts of how this works. Anthony Holmes 18 January 2010 11:16:16 PMTime zones mean that the Lotusphere Opening General Session starts at midnight Australian Eastern Daylight Saving time. So I'm sitting here waiting to either turn into a pumpkin; or to follow what happens. Here's how my 30 inch screen is laid out to watch the six people live blogging at http://www.lotuspherelive.com  I'm waiting for lots of interesting infobloggers!! (Actually, I'm not sure: perhaps only one of these six live blog sessions is going to be active... but I've opened them all just in case.) Over on my Mac I've also got the Lotusphere CoverIt Live blog: http://live.lotusphereblog.com/ To while away the time until the witching hour, I'm filling in the time by running up a set VMs to run Sametime 8.5 on the Mac and a PC. All in all I've got 30", 27", 17" monitors running and a laptop screen surrounding me in a semi-circle. I guest this must be a techie's idea of heaven? UPDATE: I refreshed my browser, and got the lotuspherelive blog in a nicer format: (I think Sametime Links must have loaded.)  UPDATE 2: One of the themes in the Opening General Session is "Collaboration Agenda"... hemmm... that sounds a bit like "Working Collaboration". :-) Anthony Holmes 5 January 2010 01:08:00 PMHere's a problem two of my customers have seen: A single person is getting all email except message sent to them by people on one other server. Those emails vanish. They don't appear in any mail.boxes and they aren't returned to the senders. In both cases I was impressed that my customers managed to track down that much information about the problem. It's potentially very elusive. Imagine what happens when the (non)recipient phones up the Help Desk: "I'm not getting some of my emails." "Yes, most of them arrive." "Fred told me he sent an email, but I can't see it." "No, Fred didn't get a non-delivery report." "Yes, I got the test email you just sent me" (from the Help Desk). "Mary has also just told me that she sent me an email that I didn't get." You'd be tempted to decide that the problem was caused by people covering their backsides and pretending to have sent emails, or getting forgetful, or messages going to someone else with a similar name. It would take you a while to discover that the messages had a) truly been sent b) completely vanished and c) bear only one common factor: the senders are all on a single mail server, and their server is not the destination server. (And, by they way, anybody on the Senders' server can successfully send to other people on the Recipient's mail server. So it's not a server to server routing problem.) If I've seen this problem twice, there must be many others out there with the same problem. Here's the solution: Imagine this environment: People are sending emails to Fred Flintstone from SendingServer1. Fred's Person document shows that his mail file is on Receiving Server1. The mail routing between SendingServer1 and ReceivingServer1 is working correctly for other messages. The problem is recipient specific. Mail sent from anywhere in the world (except SendingServer1) is routed by a lookup of where Fred's Mail File is in his person document. But SendingServer1 notices (and uses) a hidden field in Fred's Person document with this value: NewMailServer: SendingServer1 There is also a value in the person document for NewMailFile. These values are (properly) added to person documents as part of a user move initiated by Adminp. They are needed to ensure that mail isn't lost in the middle of a mail move. The values are normally automatically cleaned up at the end of a move. In these cases the following happened: - The Administrators didn't think that Fred's mail file was in the middle of a user move when they encountered this problem. But there may have been a move in the past.
- In both customers' case, there was likely to be some strangeness around a user move for Fred Flintstone.
In one case a person was moved to another server and then back to the original server, but Adminp was prevented from deleting the mail file on the temporary server.
In the other case, the customer simply fixed the problem and didn't track down the root cause, but it was likely to be similar.
- No matter what happened to confuse the Adminp move, the critical point was to discover that there was an additional mail file for Fred Flintstone sitting on SendingServer1.
When SendingServer1 saw that the NewMailServer value was SendingServer1, and when it also discovered that it had the mail file named in NewMailFile, it used those values in preference to Fred's "proper" mail server and mail file values. Removing the NewMailServer and NewMailFile values and deleting the rogue mail file on SendingServer1 fixes the problem. (Before you delete the mail file, make sure the 'missing' messages are copied/replicated to Fred's proper mail file. For background information on the two fields, see this document: AdminP Move MailFile Request Adds Two New Fields to Person Document (NewMailFile and NewMailServer) http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21087214 |
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