Ten Tips for Domino Administrators

Here are ten of my favorite tips for working with Domino. Some of these may be familiar to seasoned Domino users, but there are others you may not be aware of. All of them should help make your life a little easier when working with Domino.

1. Run Domino as a service. When installing Domino on Windows NT or Windows 2000, you should run the Domino server as a service. This ensures that the Domino server always starts up correctly when the server is restarted, and also prevents the problems caused when a logged-on user at the server starts the Domino server. In that case, if that user is logged off at the server, then the Domino server processes are automatically killed.


2. Monitor your servers with Domino Administrator. If you have a number of Domino servers to support, consider setting up a dedicated monitoring PC nearby that has Domino Administrator at the Server->Monitoring tab, with monitoring started. This page has a configurable list of servers to poll each minute. When a server is successfully polled, particular server tasks are checked that they are running and also that the values of specific server statistics are queried. Otherwise, if a server is out of contact, the screen will display warning signs for that server and any missing task(s). In this way, you can keep an eye on your Domino network and, with a glance, know the health of your servers.


3. Use the LOG_REPLICATION setting when troubleshooting replication. One of the main problems you will encounter when supporting Domino is solving replication issues. The default console and log entries may not be very helpful, so consider using the LOG_REPLICATION parameter within the server's NOTES.INI file. A value of 0 turns off logging replication, and a value of 5 produces the highest level of output. Typically a value of 2 (log to the database level) or 3 (log to the database element level) provides sufficient information to solve your problem. Be warned: Use these value settings only when resolving replication problems, otherwise they will produce unnecessary debug reports within the server log database LOG.NSF.



Related Reading Lotus Domino Administration in a Nutshell By Greg Neilson

4. Consider implementing transaction logging. Transaction logging is a new feature within R5 that allows you to restore a Domino database to a given point in time, rather than only to the last backup. Even if you are not interested in this type of database recovery, one benefit of implementing transaction logging is that it can lead to improved database write performance. Once transaction logging is implemented, the server writes updates to the sequential log files, and the actual database is updated as a background task. The performance gain comes about because it is faster to write to these sequential log files than it is to Domino databases. For best results, the log files should be on a dedicated disk. Even better, mirroring the disk that holds the log files ensures your server can withstand a failed disk drive for these logs.


5. Use the SHOW CONFIGURATION and SET CONFIGURATION console commands. Checking and updating the contents of the server's NOTES.INI file can be a problem because it is a text file that resides on the file system of the Domino server. One way around this is the SHOW CONFIGURATION and SET CONFIGURATION server console commands. For example, suppose you wanted to check and possibly update the value held in the ServerTasksAt2= line within NOTES.INI. This parameter specifies the server tasks that are to be scheduled to run at two a.m. daily. To view the contents of this parameter, you could issue the console command SHOW CONFIGURATION ServerTasksAt2, and, to update it, run the command SET CONFIGURATION ServerTasksAt2=Design. Alternatively, to remove the ServerTasksAt2= line from NOTES.INI, you could issue the command SET CONFIGURATION ServerTasksAt2=.


6. Consider implementing Domino clustering. It's a good idea to make use of the Domino clustering feature. This enables fail-over and load balancing between the two to six Domino servers within the cluster. Since this is application-level clustering, the servers within the cluster can be on different operating system platforms. Keep in mind that the more servers you have within a cluster, the more work each server has to do to ensure that each database update is replicated to the other servers within the cluster. Clustering can be used for Notes clients and also for Web clients when the new R5 feature ICM (Internet Cluster Manager) is used.
7. Consider implementing iNotes for Outlook. If you have to migrate email users to Domino who are already using Outlook, consider implementing the new iNotes for Outlook client. Typically, Outlook users do not take kindly to the Notes user interface, and this option may be a satisfactory compromise. This is not covered in Lotus Domino Administration in a Nutshell (the book was released just before 5.0.5 was generally available), but this feature allows Outlook 98 and Outlook 2000 users to access their mail when they are either attached to a Domino server or when accessing their local mail in offline mode.


8. Consider implementing soft deletions. One useful feature you might want to implement for user mail databases running R5 is "soft deletions." This is a new, advanced property that can be set on each database. It requires the COMPACT task be run on each mail database to accommodate the changes to the internal database organization. Users then can create a special view type (to see these soft deleted documents) within their mail database that contains deleted documents. Of course, this will consume additional disk space for your mail databases, but may save valuable time from having to perform a database restore to retrieve important messages that should not have been deleted.


9. Use the NotesConnect tool to troubleshoot connectivity problems. If you are trying to solve connectivity problems between Domino servers and also between Domino servers and Notes clients, it's a good idea to use the NotesConnect tool. This tool is much more effective than just using ping alone because it can use the Notes RPC port 1352, standard ports for POP, IMAP, SMTP, and so on, or even any TCP/IP port you choose. This tool is particularly valuable when you are using Domino servers that are behind firewalls.


10. Learn LDAP. LDAP (Lightweight Access Directory Protocol) is going to be the way that Domino integrates with other directory information (for example, the Windows 2000 Active Directory). So you might want to get started now and learn how to set up and configure LDAP, and also learn how to use the included ldapsearch.exe tool to check the results returned from an LDAP query.

Related Reading Lotus Domino Administration in a Nutshell By Greg Neilson

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