Domino and the future
I know what you’re thinking, not another blog article about Domino’s future. Well no. This is about Domino dealing with future dates and what happens if there’s a blip with your OS’s date Friday, we had the unfortunate situation of one of our servers briefly believing it was operating in 2020. For the fraction of a second the server blipped, seven databases were accessed, including names.nsf. From this point forward the server believed these databases were operating in 2020. Although dates were correctly being set, all new and edited documents inherited the same last modified date of July 25th 2020 corrupting their replication history. Although the cluster replicator immediately pushed the changes across, it continued to report that it was unable to deal with dates so far in the future. IBM helpfully has a tech note covering such an eventuality. Don’t bother searching for it because it rather helpfully tells…
Agents ignoring Readers Fields in 8.5.3
We’ve just upgraded a server to 8.5.3. We have an agent that runs as a ‘web user’ but has ‘full admin rights’. The agent basically reads a view with documents that have readers fields and assembles them for display to the user. The agent needs to grab info from a protected database so has ‘full administration rights’. Previously the documents were read with the ‘users’ access permissions. So readers fields were obeyed. Various versions of this code has run this way for 10 years. Under 8.5.3 this is not the case. The readers fields are being ignored. Has anyone else experienced this issue?
XPages Single Copy Design
I’m posting this on behalf of my colleague David Harding (@dharding) who’s been investigating XPages Single Copy Design. I think it’s best I leave it to Dave to explain: We are looking to roll out XPages Single Copy Design to several thousand databases. So far, we have not been able to find a recommended practice for rolling out the XPages Single Copy Design flag and template path to all of these databases. Documentation on the Lotus Notes and Domino Application Development wiki (http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/ddwiki.nsf/dx/Single_Copy_XPage_Design#Does+employing+SCXD+typically+have+a+positive+or+negative+affect+on+speed+of+performance%3F) suggests that setting the options in the template should propagate to databases that inherit from that template. Quote from page: “Is it true that selecting or de-selecting SCXD in a template does not propagate to applications already created with that template? This is not the case. If a template is set to use a SCXD database and an application is created from this template then the new…
Problems with Google Search Appliance and Domino’s compressed HTTP output
If you use Domino’s HTTP GZIP compression, you may have issues with your Google Search Appliance reporting: Malformed HTTP header: empty content It appears that the Google box will tell Domino that it accepts compressed content in the HTTP headers even though it is unable to process the content. Luckily I found an easy solution on the Google Search Appliance support forum. The solution is to add headers to the Google Box’s http requests. Open the GSA admin interface. Select ‘Crawl and Index‘ -> ‘HTTP Headers‘ In the ‘Additional HTTP Headers for Crawler’ enter: Accept-Encoding: *;q=0
$Dir on Solaris
If you are one of the few Solaris users and use the ‘Dir$’ function to read directories in your administrative routines to process databases in a directory. Be aware that it doesn’t work for databases over 2GBs in size. They’re omitted from list. We PMRed it. But it’s already been closed. Apparently it’s a code limitation and won’t be getting fixed. I expect it will be all that 32-bit Solaris code we’re still having to use. Don’t you just love having your hardware tied down by software?
A decade with Domino
This blog post has been a long time in writing. From about 1998, my team was responsible for supporting learning technology projects within the University. The range of projects was diverse from programmable computer chip simulations to supporting more traditional computer aided learning packages such as CD-ROMs or web-based ‘interactive’ learning objects. We also had a responsibility to identify technologies that could be implemented as University services. A number of our early distance learning projects had requirements for on-line support. Our manager heard of a project running in Engineering that was using something called ‘Lotus Notes’ to support their distance learning course. Despite some misgivings on my part, Lotus Notes was adopted for our projects. I have to admit, my first impressions (and continued impression) is that the Notes client is awful. I’m probably the only Domino developer who’s never developed for the client. Luckily as a group, we weren’t…
HTTP Redirect buffer overflow
We use the Domino redirect [url] to direct to users to different web pages. One of our systems handles the Athens devolved authentication used many by UK Universities to provide access to journal subscriptions to students off-campus. Athens basically works by a set of redirects and can be used by users either pre journal search or post. If they choose not to pre-authenticate. When a user accesses a journal they’re directed to Athen’s login page. They can then identify their host institution. At this point a series of redirects takes place. Basically Athens sends a long URL to a Java agent on Domino. This url has a long MD5 session hash and information to pass back to Athens so that it can then direct the user to the correct page on publisher’s website. We process the hash, validate it and then using a private key create a new hash that…
Two Web Application Development Consultants posts with a focus on ‘Learning Technologies’
Sorry, for posting a job advert. But it might be useful to any out of work Domino developers. 2 x Applications and Development Consultant (with a focus on Learning Technology) We are looking for experienced web-based software development professionals with substantial programming experience (preferably with expertise in Lotus Domino, Lotuscript, Java but additional languages such as .NET would be of interest) to join our web and learning applications team; developing and supporting the University’s intranet and on-line learning and business support environments. More details can be found on The University of Hertfordshire’s website
Server loosing permissions
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.
Odd Notes problems
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…