Cobbler, cobbler, mend thy shoes

Anthony Holmes  18 August 2008 10:24:19 AM

My home test Domino server has been running on Domino 8.5 Beta 1 for a week or so now, and I thought it might be a good idea to look at how it was tracking. So I opened up my Domino Domain Monitoring database. And I was a little surprised at how many problems it was reporting on my little server.

One of my clients gave a wry comment about DDM soon after it was released. They ran it, and saw a lot of warnings. "It's just like IBM and Stats & Events. The number of things to look at is too overwhelming." When I saw that I had 73 warnings, it was easy to agree. This server has a single (real) mail user and acts as a web server for a few hundred viewers. It's running just fine: how on earth can there be 73 problems?

The question is: are those 73 reports just noise, or are they things that I really ought to be fixing?

I've just spent an hour looking at the reports, and the answer is, there are quite a few things that I ought to be fixing.

Here are some of the things I found:

• Ages ago I set up Message Tracking. At some stage a Design upgrade had disable the reports.  DDM gave me simple instructions to fix this, and a link to the design of the agent to let me do it. Neat.
• Server.Load has a Domino Directory called namagent.nsf.It had too many unique field names. A database property needed to be set to fix this. Hmm. This is a design issue dating back to the change between Domino 4.6 and 5. I'm not sure why I'm seeing it now, but at least I've fixed it. Noise. I guess.
• An error in the log of my blog related to keywords. Hmm. This seems to be a real issue. The Keywords view is failing. Possibly it is trying to look up a form that doesn't exist. I'd better try to see why this isn't working.
• The only server crash I've had in 18 months was due to an index error. There are a couple of databases reporting more benign view and FT index errors. Maybe it's time to free up some disk space and do a defrag. Maybe I need to do some database maintenance. There seems to be a bit of a low lying problem here that I defnitely wouldn't have noticed without DDM. This is important.

Why am I telling you all this?

My reason for blogging this is not to keep you all up to date with the minutia of how badly I've configured my Domino server. (It's not that bad, honest!) My reason was to share my conclusions:

• Yes, DDM presents a long list of potential issues. Fortunately, I won't have to work through all 73 of them. Sometimes fixing one issue will take a couple of things off the list.
• On the whole, every item listed is something that deserves attention. These are real server problems, application problems, or they are issues with the potential to cause problems in the future.
• Sometimes the offered solutions are a joy to implement: DDM tells you what to fix and gives you a direct link. Often it's less helpful. But I can't really expect DDM to tell my why the log for my blog has a broken view lookup. That's either a design issue or a problem with my implementation. Sadly I'm going to have to nut that one out for myself.
• Am I going to clear the list entirely? I confess, it seems intimidating. Perhaps I should set myself the goal of dealing with a few of them each day until I've got them all sorted. I'm down to 53 already.

After all, it's my profession to advise on Domino administration. A barber can justify having badly cut hair because they can't cut their own hair. But a cobbler can't justify having bad shoes. If their own shoes are worn and broken, how much care are they taking fixing their customers' shoes?



A busy bee that, err, would never neglect to look at DDM. Photographed by me in the Alexandra Gardens, Melbourne, in January 2007.

• Comments [0]