SnTT-Wow, you really do need the LocalDomainServers group in the Domino Directory!

Remember back in the old days when you were just learning all that there is to know about the wonders of Lotus Domino? Sitting in class wide eyed listening to the instructor tell you things all about ACL's and how they work. And then along that journey at some point I am sure you had heard about the importance of the LocalDomainServers group in the Domino Directory. How all of the servers in your domain should be listed in it so that they could all play together happily and do what Domino needs to do. Well, I remembered that too and have pretty much left that group alone. That is until today. I should of known when my day started off with my local profile in XP being corrupt that I was in for a long day.

As my day was winding to a close, I received a phone call from one of the remote plants. It seemed that they were unable to log into iNotes and were getting the following error in the web browser:

6/12/2008 03:08:08 PM: ERROR: Unable to write changes to the Person document - contact administrator [/names.nsf?Login&Username=&Password=....etc

Of course my first thought was that the Domino Directory was corrupt. So with that, I brought down the server and ran compact -c and did an updall -R and saw several errors. Seeing that, I went on to OS copy over another Domino Directory in hopes that it would fix the issue. Not two minutes after that copy starts my phone rings again. Another user on another server is having the same issue. So I connect into that server and see the same problems going on there. That's when it hit me something major was occurring. As I begin troubleshooting the problem, I try to open up the server document in the Domino Directory and I get the "You are not authorized" stop message. "What!?...But I am the freakin admin! I'm in the Full Access Administrators group!" Mind you, many other expletives were being strewn from my mouth, but that pretty much summed up what I was saying. That's when I started diving deeper into the Domino Directory on the Admin server to see if the Administrators group was in there. Nope, it was gone. Then I went to look for the LocalDomainServers and found that gone too along with the OtherDomainServers group. Needless to say, once I replaced those groups from a restored Domino Directory, things starting working properly again. But what caused it in the first place? Good question. I'm not too sure. But I have an idea. When I deleted the LocalDomainServers, OtherDominServers and Administrators group from a view in my local personal address book, the application that placed that view there had decided that I must have meant I wanted those to also be removed from the Domino Directory. Harrumph. I don't know why in the hell it did that and I plan on testing that out next week. For now, I'm on a long weekend.
So the moral of the story, regardless of where you see the LocalDomainServer group listed, just leave it alone.

Absent lately

I haven't been too much in a blogging mood the past couple of weeks, just been uber busy around the office. I've been assigned to a project that I can't go too deep into the details of here, but let's just say that it has been taking a lot of my time. It involves dealing with and talking to a lot of different vendors and you know when that happens your brain can easily turn into mush. I'm hoping that another week or two of this should clear things up, and then I can get back into full-on Domino Admin stuff, like studying for and passing my 702 test! I had set a goal to take, (and pass), the test by the end of August. Oops, didn't make that one happen. I just want to get to it before Lotusphere though so I don't feel the pressure to do it down there.
Speaking of Lotusphere, I think I finally got the registration thing taken care of. They company sent out the right invoice with the right address and we got things taken care of there. Word has it from Turtle's Lotusphere2008 blog that the Dolphin is already waitlisted. Wow!

Well, that's it for a Friday night here in good old Ohio. Next weekend is the big Civil War reenactment weekend over in Zoar! It's an awesome bi-annual event that brings in a lot of reenactors from all over the country. Okay, just to clear up any confusion, there were no battles in Ohio, let alone Zoar, during the Civil War outside of Confederate General John Morgan's raids up the Ohio River. So if your into that sort of thing, be sure to look at my Flickr next weekend for pics. Since I am within walking distance to it now, there will likely be a whole lot of them. As for this weekend, we're helping our friend Jen at the Medina Renaissance Faire. But for now, I'm off to bed.

New DST information for Domino

Susan Bulloch has posted the latest information regarding the new Daylight Savings Time rules on her blog. The documentation is much easier to follow plus the agents to fix calendar entries are out of beta. Check it out, time's a wastin!

When emails return from the dead!

I have seen this issue come up a couple of times in the past in my environment, and it's happened again last week. I am running a Domino cluster for my mail hub and for the most part it does what its suppose to do. But since I had installed Domino 7 last year, something weird is occurring after one of the servers faults and reboots. Documents that were deleted in some people mail files come back from the replica on the other server. This doesn't happen to everyone, just some people and some of the times. So like any good Domino Admin, I called support. Luckily, I got someone that was already working on the issue with someone else. From the tests that we did using a database and NotesPeek, we were able to recreate the situation to show that we too are having the issue. The problem is the sequence number and time get lost somehow in the deletion stub. So when the server comes back up, the emails come back from the other replica. He did inform me that Lotus has created a hotfix for it, but it is going to require me to recreate the mail cluster by deleting all of the mail files off the clustered server, and re-replicate them after the patch is applied. No big deal. Just need to find some time to do it now. Of course, that will have to wait until after I get back from Lotusphere ;-)