Our Domino servers (7.03) run on Solaris and we’ve recently moved them onto new hardware. As part of the move, they have been moved in Solaris zones. Unfortunately since the changes we’ve experienced a serious issue that appears to be related to server permissions. Users are loosing the ability to upload files as it appears that the server is rewriting the permissions to the ID file so root access is required. Effectively the server is loosing access to it’s own ID file. So far we’ve been unable to identify why this happens.

We all experience issues with all software and Domino / Notes is not immune but it’s really infuriating when two issues strike at once.

We’ve been moving server’s around and my Design (8.02) client stopped replicating. Not in the normal way, an invalid connection document, but one where any replication event caused an immediate NSD. After much hair pulling – and at my age that’s something you want to avoid in case it doesn’t grow back – the only solution appears to be a complete reinstall.

The second more serious issue was that one of our servers lost permissions to it’s own ID file. Although HTTP continued to serve files anything requiring the ID file stopped functioning. A quick chmod solved the problem and all functionality returned. But this is the first live server we’ve run in a Solaris zone and the how zones function is beyond my basic unix skills. Hopefully this is a simple unix configuration issue and not some fundamental problem with domino on solaris (it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve run into solaris issues). One for our Domino admin to sort out tomorrow.

We have a facility for staff that allows them to download an Excel marking scheme, enter student marks and then to upload it as a tab delimited file (or xml file) back into the system. Last night a member of staff using the facility crashed both servers in our cluster.

On further inspection (and a lot of development server crashes!) I finally narrowed the problem down to a single line of code

Line Input #fileID, strLine

On further investigation it appears that the user exported their marking scheme from Excel using the ‘Unicode (.txt)’ rather than ‘ Text (.txt)’ and it’s the import of Unicode that was causing Domino to crash. My quick solution to stop the server crash is to use ‘Dos2Unix’ convert the file before importing. Although it seems to alter the format so that it no long imports correctly, it’s stopped the server from crashing.