Cut Down On Directory Assistance Traffic

Posted on August 20, 2008 by qtzar

When you have more then one Domino Directory or if you use a secondary address book for authentication to web apps for external people then you will eventually look at a feature of Lotus Domino called Directory Assistance.

You turn on Directory Assistance (DA) by creating a DA.NSF from the Directory Assistance Database template (DA50.NTF), create a record in that database that points to the secondary address book and then in the server doc you fill out the Directory Assistance fields on the basics tab and then restart the server. (A server restart is required to turn on DA)

The record that points to the secondary address book needs a server name and a database name and for a large environment this sometimes generates a LOT of traffic as any server that has a replica of the DA database and has DA enabled will start doing lookups to the server that you have specified in the DA record.

To get around the traffic problems in the past I have always used separate DA.NSF databases on each server that do not replicate so that I could point each DA.NSF to a local replica of the secondary address book. This worked great for cutting down on network traffic as all lookups were now local but it was a pain to manage as if I did have to change DA I’d have to do it on every instance of the DA database.

Recently I enabled Activity Trends in the domino environment where I work and noticed that the secondary address book we use here was being hit millions of times a day on a single server because of the way DA had been setup in the past. I talked with the other admin ( who sometimes goes by the name Greyhawk68 ) and we decided that implementing the workaround above would really help and cut down on network traffic.

During the implementation I decided to have a quick read of the help files for DA and noticed something I wish I had found a long time ago. Apparently you can now use an * instead of specifying what server DA should look for the secondary address book on. By using a * it always looks on the local server for the secondary address book.

So now you can make a DA.NSF that replicates to all your servers and easily make sure that it only uses the secondary address book on the local server and not cause loads of network traffic due to lookups.

Since making the change in our environment the server availability index on the poor server that was originally listed first in the DA.NSF has seen a significant jump…

Tagged with: , ,
Posted in Uncategorized

How to resolve the Mac Notes 8.5 Crash after installing Fusion 2 Beta 2

Posted on August 5, 2008 by qtzar

After installing VMWare Fusion 2 Beta 2
my Lotus Notes 8.5 Public Beta 1 client started crashing. A LOT. Most notably
when you right click on anything or click on any of the action bar buttons
that would drop down a menu of options. I don’t know about you but I right
click on a lot of things in the notes client so having it crash and perform
an NSD every few minutes just wasn’t very productive at all so I decided
to see if I could figure out what was going wrong.

Heres what I found…

Tagged with: , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized

Notes Domino 8.5 Public Beta 1 Available.

Posted on May 30, 2008 by qtzar

While my machine slowly chuggs away downloading the beta code I have been reading the release notes to see what I can find of interest to those thinking of evaluating it and I’m distilling what I think are important points here.

Widgets and Live Text support on the Linux and Mac OS platforms is introduced with this release; previously, Widgets and Live text was available on supported Windows platforms only.

Notes 8.5 adds support for Notes standard configuration installation and use from a USB drive. ( otherwise known as NOMAD in previous releases it used to only support the basic client in 8.0x )

Add Google Calendar entries, another Notes user’s calendar, or an iCal feed.

Forward contacts as a vCard from Contacts. Select the contact(s) you want to forward as a vCard and choose “Forward vCard”.

New Notebook (formerly Personal Journal template). The Personal Journal template has a new name, and a new look. When you install or upgrade to Notes 8.5, any new Notebook you create will use the new template (Notebook8.ntf).

The Domino Attachment and Object Service (DAOS) reduces the total cost of ownership of maintaining any participating Notes database by storing all file attachments in a separate repository on the server and retrieving them by reference.

The auto-populated groups feature uses pre-defined criteria to automatically determine and update group membership. Use the auto-populated groups feature to apply policies to users and groups based on their home servers.

A Notes ID vault is an optional, server-based database that holds protected copies of Notes user IDs. An ID vault allows administrators and users to easily manage Notes user IDs. When IDs are lost, new copies are easily recovered from the ID vault. When users forget their Notes passwords, administrators can provide help instructions that are displayed when users click the new Forgotten Password button in the Notes login window. Authorized personnel can reset (change) the passwords, without requiring access to the ID files or the vault.

The Domino Web server can serve files compressed by gzip (GNU zip); this feature is enabled by default.

Domino Designer moves to the Eclipse platform for Notes 8.5

A new Ultralite mode provides mail, contacts, and a day-at-a-glance calendar on the Apple iPhone or iPod touch.

The full mode of Domino Web Access is on a new tabbed framework for documents and views. This new framework has the look and feel of the lite mode that was introduced in 8.0.1. It provides more parity with the Notes client, and is more efficient.

Before installing or upgrading to Notes 8.5 beta, you should first uninstall your existing Notes client.

Domino version 8.5 public beta 1 introduces new ODS level 50. Domino databases are not upgraded to the new ODS level by default, and no conversion is required as part of the upgrade. Use Create_R8_Databases=1 to upgrade to the latest ODS. ( note this may be in your notes.ini if you added it there to upgrade to ODS48 in the 8.0x server )

The Notes Client on Macintosh now runs Java agents. Locally scheduled background Java agents, foreground Java agents (actions), and Java agents running in a background client thread are all supported. Background agents that use LS2J do not yet work

Tagged with: ,
Posted in None

Load your JavaScript Frameworks From Google

Posted on May 28, 2008 by qtzar

I don’t know about anybody else but when I’m writing a new Domino application that will have a nice web based UI I will probably add the javascript library and resources that I decide on using into the NSF so that the application will be portable between servers.

If I was working in a fixed environment I could just place the required files directly on the server and I’d know they were there but for something like BlogSphere that anybody can download that’s just impossible to do.

But now there is a new option thanks to Google. They have started hosting a selection of different JavaScript libraries on their servers that anybody can freely reference from within their own applications. They are hosting different versions of the scripts and have vowed to never remove a hosted script from their servers so that it is always available.

One nice thing about hosted script libraries this is that if multiple applications, even if on different servers, are using the libraries then they will be cached in the end users browser, making them load faster for the end user and, of course, taking the traffic hit away from your server.

And it couldn’t be easier to use. Lets say I want to use MooTools V1.1.1 then all I do is add


http://www.google.com/jsapi

If I always want the latest version of the library I can just leave out the version number and the loader will know which one to provide and if I always want the latest in the version 1 codestream I just put a ‘1’ in the version field and it will load in the latest V1.x release.

For more information check out the Google AJAX Libraries API site.

Tagged with:
Posted in Uncategorized
Archives