Domino Configuration Tuner and Vista’s UAC Don’t Mix

Normally the first thing I do with a Windows
Vista machine is turn off the User Account Control ( UAC ) that pops up
that wonderful ‘Windows Needs Your Permission’ message when ever you try
to do anything useful with your computer like install software, move a
file or even sneeze in the vicinity of the machine but I do have UAC turned
on in one of my VM’s and this was the VM I had decided to test the new
Domino Configuration Tuner, that was part of the Notes/Domino 8.5 release,
in.

When you go to the DCT interface for
the first time it needs to deploy a couple of extra files to your notes
installation, some of them are placed in the data directory and some of
them are placed in the notes executable directory. On XP or a Vista machine
with UAC turned off this is no problem, the files are deployed and you
are prompted to restart your Notes client but with UAC turned on it runs
into a bit of an issue, the files to be deployed to the Notes executable
directory don’t get deployed and because it’s the notes client trying to
put the file onto the hard drive the usual UAC prompt does not pop up.
Even if the file deployment fails you will still be asked to restart your
notes client and you wont know there is anything wrong till you start DCT
again and your asked to restart the notes client yet again.

So how do you get around the deployment
problem without turning off UAC? Well the good news is that it is very
simple but will involve you copying the files in manually so that you can
see the UAC prompt and accept it. The first thing you need to do is get
the file that needs to be deployed, to do this open the DCT.NSF database
up in the Domino Designer and look in the Resources/Applets section. You
should see a couple of applets listed there.  The one we are interested
in is the one called DCT . Highlight it and then select the ‘Export’ option
from the action bar and save it to your Windows desktop. Done that, ok,
now exit your Notes client.

Looking at your windows desktop, or
wherever you saved the applet you probably won’t see any file called DCT,
instead you’ll find a folder called JVM and inside that you’ll find a folder
called LIB and inside that there is yet another folder called EXT and finally
inside that you’ll find DCT.JAR. Now all you have to do is move that file
to the equivalent directory in your Notes executable folder and you’ll
see the wonderful, always welcome, super, fantastic Windows Vista UAC prompt
second guessing your decision to put the file exactly where it’s needed.

Now you can start your Notes admin client
again, load up the Domino Configuration Tuner, scan a few servers and see
a list of performance improvement suggestions for your servers. DCT is
a great tool and I’ll heartily recommend to all Notes Admins to run it
on their servers and take the time to implement the suggestions.

Vista UAC – You are coming to a sad
realization, Cancel or Allow?