Domino Diversions

For those of you who don't know me or what I do, I am a Domino Administrator and a Domino Developer.  I work for BinaryTree, as a Senior Messaging Engineer.  I am regularly working domain migrations related to rebranding, acquisitions, and divestitures.  In my role I regularly visit customer sites to consolidate domains, split into domains, or go through the process of renaming users and servers to new certifiers.  These projects can run from days to months depending on the size of the customer and the length of the engagement.

In doing this, I've had the opportunity to work on many different platforms with many different customer businesses.  As a result, I've encountered a number of different problems that exist within Domino and Lotus Notes related to these moves.  This allows the developer in me to build tools, updates and custom requests for our customers on a regular basis.  If these customer requests are viable enough, I will add them as a product enhancement to our tool we call CMT for Domains, Servers, Users and Desktops.  This tool is a conglomeration of a number of different agents and processes BinaryTree has built over the last ten years relating to various engagements and that are now built into a work flow related migrations.  If you are interested in learning more about the tool, contact our sales group.

I am curious to know if you as readers would be interested in me sharing my experiences with regards to the many different environments, encounters, and idiosyncrasies associated these moves.  I am considering a White paper on Domain Migration Best Practices and would appreciate your feedback if you think this is a viable topic of discussion.

"Binary Tree needs to add more travelling consultants to the consultant group.  These positions will travel at a minimum 80% of the time for the foreseeable future. we need folks that are equally experienced in Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes or Domino environments and running both in parallel within an organization. We’re looking for people that have a lot of migrations under their belts and preferably have had exposure to our own CMT tools and/or Quest.  Please send your resume's to :  Jobs at BinaryTree.com"

I'd like to take the opportunity to welcome John Wargo to BinaryTree.  He joins BinaryTree as a Solutions Architect on August 18th of this year.  He will be reporting Carl Baumann our director of Sales.  John has been instrumental in the past with the development and sales of ADT with the Wolcott Group of Ohio.  John is an outstanding technical addition to BinaryTree.  Take a few minutes if you know John and welcome him to the company.

From Bob's blog.

http://www.bobzblog.com/tuxedoguy.nsf/dx/whoo-hoo-steve-mulen-joins-binary-tree

There are two commands that are known to fail in this release of Lotus Notes

@Command([WindowWorkspace]);
@Command([WorkspaceStackReplicaIcons])

The @Command([WindowWorkspace]); has been internally identified as broken in 8.0.1 and any subsequent commands issued after this will fail.  

Also the ability to programmatically exit the Lotus Notes via @Commands([FileExit]) or @Command([ExitNotes]) do not execute and display the following dialogbox:



These functions will not work in Eclipse (notes.exe) but ironically will work under nlnotes.exe

Binary Tree proudly presents its first short film about Bill who has a very bad work day. If only he used Binary Tree's CMT Suite of Solutions.





Lotus
Co-existence
Microsoft

To all my fellow Domino, Lotus people who are from God's Country, I would like to say

Happy Canada Day

A co-worker and I are in the middle of a large discussion regarding clustering.  I have read in the Domino Administration client help file from the "Clustering Requirements" document that:

"All servers in a cluster must use TCP/IP and be on the same IBM® Lotus® Notes® named network"

My opinion is that yes, the cluster members should be in the same Notes Named Network.  I have a co-worker saying that this is not a requirment and that I can have cluster members in different Notes Named Networks.  

Have you ever seen this configuration and do you support it?

A few days ago I mentioned a problem with unique organizational units and renaming to new heirarchial certifiers.  After opening a PMR with Lotus, we were informed that a hot fix did exist for Windows based and will be providing us one for the Solaris servers we have.

Aa as work around, we will implement a new Windows server as our Administrative server for the Directory and AdminP, install the same version of Domino we have (6.5.6 Fix Pack 2) then apply the hot fix.

I will further qualify that Fix Pack 3 does not resolve the issue and I have not yet tested Fix Pack 3 and the Hot fix either.  That will follow up.

Thanks.

Working during this large migration we discovered that a bug exists on 6.5.6 and Fix Pack 2 has a problem with Unique Organizational Unit Names.  In a previous post (link.) I mentioned how to move away from Unique organizational units.  Well it seems that Lotus has resolved this problem but unexpectedly.  

I'm on an engagement where every user has a unique ou.  This is a requirement for this particular customer and I won't go into details.  Well, when utilizing a C++ API call as a part of the rename process, we have determined that the end users name changes but the AdminP rename process would drop the Unique OU value.  Well if we find any strange things with the rename we try to do the same thing manually.  Well this was not successful either.  When we manually rename a user we saw an error in the Admin4.nsf after attempting to complete the move request.  This error is "The new name in the supplied Name Change Request does not match the subject name in the supplied certificate".  

Well this is something that we found in Domino 6.5.6 Fix Pack 2.  We attempted to upgrade to 6.5.6 Fix Pack 3 and it did not matter.  The problem still existed.  Next, we went to 7.0.3.  In this case, we discovered the problem still existed.  We engaged support from IBM and discovered that this is a bug.  The following is a quote from IBM

"This technote and your test prove that there is a Domino issue going on with these servers. It is not related to the OS. According to the documentation the problem is fixed in Domino 702. We also know that it was a regression in 703 that is scheduled to be fixed in Domino 7.0.4.( SPR# WMUH77GJ8E). For now, I would suggest upgrading to Domino 7.0.2."

We have tested this on 7.0.2 and it is working fine.