A great site which helps Domino admins and developers learn from the mistakes of others.

A bit light on information for the moment but it looks like a great place to pick up some troubleshooting tips.

One of peoples big peeves about Lotus Notes is the Out of Office feature which only responds once a day - the agent can be tweaked to run more regularly but without first assessing the impact first most admins are reluctant to change this setting.

As per Ed Brills post it appears the new version of Notes (nicknamed 'Hannover') will feature an instant OOTO message.

Odd - Windows Vista And Lotus Notes - stores personal data in 'c:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Lotus\Notes\...'

I wonder how many applications this will break or how many people this will confuse ? The 'Users' thing is almost a throwback to the NT4 days. I liked keeping things in 'c:\lotus\' or at least in the login profile.

Ed Brill covers the new Notes on Linux. Should be cool.

ArsTechnica covers the same Notes on Linux and brings up the hoary old entry in 'Interface Hall of Shame'.

Interesting discussion in the forums - people can be a little myopic about email and groupware. Integrated Email & Calendaring is not Groupware - what people fail to realise is that Notes/Domino allows for a much higher degree of collaboration than its competitors (Exchange and Groupwise) and does it in a way that actually makes some kind of sense from an IT perspective.

A colleague from Cambridge (Hi Chris!) pointed to an interesting piece of pro-Notes news - You’ll Pry Lotus Notes Out Of Their Cold, Dead Hands. Lotus Notes really is a brilliant app once you get over its interface quirks.

Handy - Ed Brill points to a powerpoint presentation chock full of Lotus Notes client tips. Alan Lepofsky has plenty of other useful Notes advice on his site too.

Basically I followed the steps from MadJunks Clustering Guide. His site has plenty of other useful Domino related idiots guide type things too.

Here are some additional notes (most of this is pretty obvious to hardcore Domino admins but a lot of it was stuff I needed to discover for myself) :

Need to have Connection Documents for push/pull on both servers in both directions.

Need to insure both servers have rights in each others Server Documents (Security tab) to create new Replicas and new Files.

Failover only takes affect for the end-user after closing and reopening Notes - the server knows about the failover but the client doesn't until its reopened and redirected by the other members of the cluster.

Replication needs to be tweaked - the failover is to the last successful replication (could be anywhere from 24 hours to 30min depending on setup and server load).

Mail delivery (send/receive) only seems to take place after the failed node comes back online (presumably this is just a Domino Server Document setting that needs tweaking so send/receive is possible from anyone of the cluster members.

One of the best things about the clustering is that is OS independent - once Domino is installed regardless of OS you can setup a cluster within the Domino group itself (eg between Domino servers running on AIX, Solaris, Linux, Windows etc).

Useful References

IBM - Setting up a cluster

Its interesting to note that this type of clustering is a real pain in the ass in Exchange - Say No to Active/Active Clustering.

Rebuild Mailfile Index

Error/Symptom

Delete an email message but it still remains in your view

Fix (on Domino server console)

load updall mail\.nsf -R to update the mailfile index

Fix Database Corruption

Error/Symptom

Database is corrupt -- Cannot allocate space NIF: DETECTED STORAGE CORRUPTION ERROR 'B-tree structure is invalid'

Fix (on Domino server console)

updall -R on the mail database, and then load fixup -F -J on mailfile

You can run these update/fixup commands repeatedly until the problem sorts itself out (or you give up and restore from backup).

Ed Brill discusses the new features in the next version of Notes nicknamed "Hannover". Looks pretty cool. They still insist on the custom widgets which means you always get a slight disconnect when switching from Notes to another Windows app but this gui is starting to more closely resemble Office 2003 / Longhorn - based on these screenshots.

Create a user and group to own the install (traditionally 'notes' for group and user).

Run install script to drop the files into the appropriate place (remember to install as root) via the usual install script.

Once the files are in place run the post install Domino setup script.

On a Unix system with a GUI you should get the java based GUI installer.

If you don't have a GUI but have a client machine with a web browser and java you can run a web based setup.

On the server run

/opt/lotus/bin/http httpsetup

Then point your web browser at the server. The output of the previous command will give you the port number.

The bulk of Chapter 13 is online - covers Server Tasks and Console Commands

The Directory Catalog (dc.nsf) is a cut down version of the full Address Book (names.nsf). It is automatically generated and updated from the Address Book; when the update process breaks down you can force a rebuild -

load dircat dc.nsf -r

This is run on the (primary admin) server console.

Alternatively you can goto the Configuration Document for the server in the Admin Tool and use the Clear History button.

Taken from the Notes 6 Admin Guide