techblog 

Recently I had a weird problem on my laptop. Web browsing was slow and certain lookups failed altogether. The failures were exclusively associated with nominet.org.uk domain names, specifically connections to our office network. When the problems first started my mail client failed to work unless the VPN was activated, which is not the way our security policy mandates it should work. After a while the mail client failed even after activating the VPN. I was effectively locked out of my email unless I visited the office!

The error messages from the mail client suggested that the DNS lookup for the mail server was timing out. Using wireshark on the wireless interface I noticed that there were no DNS lookups for nominet.org.uk, though other search domains were being appended. Everything in System Preferences looked fine, /etc/resolv.conf had no surprises. However, I did find a suspect file: /etc/resolver/vpn-resolver-662638-0 which contained:

domain nominet.org.uk
nameserver 213.248.199.17
timeout 3

This file dated from early 2006, which seemed odd as the laptop was only installed in March 2008! I presume it was copied over from my previous laptop by the Migration Assistant. Removal of this file fixed the problem, but where did it come from?

Our present VPN solution is based on OpenVPN and I use the Tunnelblick client to connect. My first thoughts were to blame this combination. There have been some stability problems with Tunnelblick on Leopard, apparently. But, before we used this system we used an SSL VPN solution terminating on a Netscreen firewall. I used the VPN Tracker client from Equinux to connect. I now believe the rogue resolver file was left behind by VPN Tracker after it was deleted. I am still at a loss to explain why it took so long to start affecting the laptop, or why it appeared to degrade in stages, rather than just fail.

After upgrading to Lotus Notes 8 on my Windows XP PC I found that I could not send emails. I eventually discovered that the problem was caused by PGP Desktop.

When attempting to send an email, Lotus Notes provided the following, typically cryptic, message:

Operation stopped at your request: mail.box

The problem is caused by these two lines being present in the Lotus Notes notes.ini file:

EXTMGR_ADDINS=nPgpOvid.dll
NSF_HOOKS=nPgpOvid.dll

The lines are inserted each time I start PGP Desktop 9.7. This is despite the fact that, within PGP Desktop, in Tools -> Options -> Messaging, I have not selected “Secure Email” and, in Tools -> Options -> Notifier, I have not selected “Use PGP Notifier”.

Removing the two lines shown above from notes.ini and restarting Lotus Notes solved the problem. Unfortunately this is really a workaround rather than a proper fix.

I wrote yesterday about exporting Lotus Notes calendar entries. Since then a colleague has suggested an alternative method.

From your chosen Calendar view, such as Day, Week or Month, select events using the mouse. Then use the same export method as before to produce an iCalendar file and import into your chosen calendar application.

This method of event selection has its own problems. It does ensure that events in the iCalendar file have the same timings as in Notes, but it has problems with repeated events. For example, I have fortnightly meetings held alternate Monday mornings. When importing the iCalendar file in to Apple’s iCal application I can see one occurrence, but no repeats. This is usually (but not always) the first occurrence. Google Calendar ignores these repeated events completely.

One thing to note is that selecting everything in my Notes Calendar view doesn’t work at all. Exporting results in a file which is 1.2 MB in size, but this produces an empty calendar on import into either iCal or Google Calendar. I guess there is something in there they don’t like.

It is possible to export calendar entries from Lotus Notes in the iCalendar format, the standard for calendar exchange between applications.

From your Lotus Notes Calendar, select the All Calendar Entries tab. This shows calendar entries as a list in date and time order. Each of the calendar entries is a thread, and the default view shows all threads are collapsed.

Select the entries to be exported, then choose Export… from the File menu. The default export format is Structured Text. Change this to Calendar File (*.ics), choose a name for the export file, and click Export.

When choosing the entries to be exported be aware that each calendar thread is an archive of all the operations that have affected that calendar entry. Also be aware that the head of each thread shows the details of the entry when it was created. Any subsequent changes will only be reflected in the iCalendar export if the thread is expanded and the reschedule notices manually selected. This does make the export process manually intensive.

These instructions are accurate for the Lotus Notes 7.0.3 client running on Mac OS X 10.5.1 (Leopard).

I run Ubuntu 64-bit and have never managed to install lotus notes 8 client - the install always failed. Having just upgraded to Gutsy I thought I would give it another try. I had to run the installer a few times and install some 32-bit libs but it worked and there was notes 8 in the menu. Great. But then I logged in and the fonts were unreadable. You can easily change the default fonts and by changing them to Arial I did get something readable - with a magnifying glass! Then I found a post (sorry - lost the link) that said add Display_font_adjustment=5 to notes.ini

This worked (I ended up turning this down to a value of 0.5 and text was still very readable) for most windows but the login, spell check and error message boxes were all still the original unreadable font. Turns out that the default font is Luxi which is available in the “ttf-xfree86-nonfree” package.

Now at least all notes windows are readable.

Some users here have reported that when they open HTML email containing images that the images just appear as red boxes containing a small x. I found the solution to this problem on the Notes forums.

The issue seems to be that web navigator database (perweb.nsf) doesn’t exist. To fix this issue (I tested it on a mac) do the following.

1. Edit your current location (popup menu at bottom right)
2. Goto the Internet Browser tab
3. Select Notes as the internet browser
4. Set retrieve/open pages to “from Notes workstation”
5. Save the location document (the thing you are editing)
6. Open an email that contains images. They should now appear.
7. Try a couple of emails if it doesn’t work first time
8. Once you have working images you can go back and set your internet browser to firefox or whatever you use.

Here at Nominet we get to apply the power of Lotus Notes to all our communication needs. So it was with great excitement that I discovered the beta release of Lotus Notes 7.0.2 for OS X.

Before starting dont forget to backup your ID files and and local address book or databases. I removed the 6.5.5 install from my mac before starting. and then just ran the Notes installer. This is much improved from previous installs and I had no problems with it.

Running it for the first time gave no surprises. Just the normal configuration steps.

Opening emails gives a Javascript error!. This is not good and appears to be happening on all messages. However disabling Javascript error messages in the User Preferences stopped it.

The default font is much better and things feel a bit quicker and smoother, but not a lot.

A worthwhile upgrade I think.

Update: The mouse scroll wheel now works!!

Update2: You can tell notes to save the state of the window at exit. so all the databases you normally open at start up will be there! Also you can now right click on the senders name in a memo and select “create memo to”.

My first impressions of Notes on Linux are not good. I have been trying out Notes on SuSe 10.0 since its release.

All of the important content panes appear hidden by default (at least under KDE, it seems they are visible under Gnome) which took me quite a while to work out. The answer is to position the mouse near the right hand side of the main Notes window — the pointer will change to a vertical bar with arrows either side, allowing you to pull the hidden window’s edge and expose the content.

I am unable to open attached files. Using the Open or Open With… menus results in a silent failure of Notes to perform either of those actions. On a related subject, that context menu doesn’t work properly as a menu either — the items disappear and reappear as you move the mouse over them.

Lastly, and perhaps worst of all, I discovered today that the JVM I thought I was using — the one that I had taken care to make sure was available on my command line — is no longer the version it was. It seems that during the installation of the Notes client, Lotus saw fit to alter my .profile - changing my PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH and CLASSPATH variables inserting its requirements at the beginning of those variables — as it is clearly the most important application on my machine. So, after I found that a tool wouldn’t work (as I was suddenly using Notes’ Java 1.4.2 instead of my JDK 1.5) I commented out the junk in my .profile only to find that my environment still was not as I had previously left it. Well, it turns out that the Notes installer hadn’t missed a trick and took the liberty of creating a brand new .bash_profile in my home directory. Lovely.

My work around for this was to first delete the new .bash_profile file, then to cut the Installshield block from my .profile and put this in a new file: $HOME/bin/lotus_notes. I then added the command line beginning /opt/IBM/Workplace that can be found in the startup shortcut found on your desktop. The application can now be started simply by typing lotus_notes on the command line, or by changing the startup shortcut’s command line to be /home/<user>/bin/lotus_notes.

This is the final lotus_notes file:

#!/bin/bash  # var 1 : CLASSPATH="/home/matt/notes":`echo $CLASSPATH` if [ -z "`echo $CLASSPATH`" ] then CLASSPATH="/home/matt/notes" else CLASSPATH="/home/matt/notes":`echo $CLASSPATH` fi export CLASSPATH  # var 1 : PATH="/home/matt/notes/jvm/bin":"/home/matt/notes":`echo $PATH` if [ -z "`echo $PATH`" ] then PATH="/home/matt/notes/jvm/bin":"/home/matt/notes" else PATH="/home/matt/notes/jvm/bin":"/home/matt/notes":`echo $PATH` fi export PATH  # var 0 NOTESDATA="/home/matt/notes/data" NOTESDATA="/home/matt/notes/data" export NOTESDATA  # var 0 NOTESBIN="/home/matt/notes" NOTESBIN="/home/matt/notes" export NOTESBIN  # var 1 : LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/home/matt/notes/jvm/bin/classic":"/home/matt/notes/jvm/bin":"/home/matt/notes":`echo $LD_LIBRARY_PATH` if [ -z "`echo $LD_LIBRARY_PATH`" ] then LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/home/matt/notes/jvm/bin/classic":"/home/matt/notes/jvm/bin":"/home/matt/notes" else LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/home/matt/notes/jvm/bin/classic":"/home/matt/notes/jvm/bin":"/home/matt/notes":`echo $LD_LIBRARY_PATH` fi export LD_LIBRARY_PATH  # Command line to run notes... /opt/IBM/Workplace Managed Client/rcp/richclient -personality com.ibm.workplace.noteswc.standalone.linux.personality

I don’t think I’ll be using Notes on Linux for a little while yet.

If you ever need to get rid of lotus notes installed on OS X then you need to remove the following.

• The Notes directory
• The Notes Data directory
• The com.ibm.lotus.notes.plist file
• The Notes Preferences file

The plist and Notes Preferences file can be found in ~/Library/Preferences/ directory.