Day: December 6, 2008

Notes.ini WiKi

A few days ago Vladislavs Tatarincevs sent me this email

Hi, Ulrich,
in your blog, you have posted some posts that relates to notes.ini,
Maybe we could join forces to create a set of Notes.ini for server and client, and post it,
I think many young administrators will benefit from this.  😉
I have opened discussion on my blog, but only few people responded and shared their notes.ini settings.

What do you think?

vlad

I think, this is a good idea. There are already some sources, where you can find notes.ini related information.

“Notes.ini Entries” and even IBM’s “Lotus Notes/Domino Notes.ini settings” database are only two of these sources. All have one thing in common. You have to know the parameter or a part of it to find information about this parameter. None of the sources are able to answer questions like: “How can I force my client to create ODS48 databases?”. This is only a simple sample and can be easily answered with “Add CREATE_R8_DATABASES=1 to your notes.ini and run compact -c”. But there might be also more difficult questions to be answered and sometimes adding a certain parameter can have side effects.

So we thougt that having a WiKi for this would be great and we would like to ask our Notes Community for some feedback. So please feel free to post your thoughs as a comment here or if you do not want to give your feedback in public, write me an email.

Looking forward to reading your feedback.


Service Dependencies

In our archiving project we sometimes have the problem that the retrieval of archived mails was not possible after the archive server was restarted. We use a third party archiving solution which not only archives mail documents but also SAP and filesystem. On one of the archive servers a Domino server is installed. This Domino controls the mail archiving part.

It was found that the issue occurs when the Domino service started before the JBoss service was started. So we had to ensure that JBoss has started and is available for use before the Domino service starts.

You might have seen, that some services already have dependencies. Double click a service in the service manager and navigate to the dependencies tab. Domino does not depent on any other service by default.

And, as you can see, there is no button or so to create a dependency or to delete an existing one. This has to be done by modifying the registry.

The Registry subkeys for services are located in the following path and can control how services are loaded.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\<Service name>

To create a new dependency, select the subkey representing the service you want to delay, click Edit, and then click Add Value. Create a new value name “DependOnService” (without the quotation marks) with a data type of REG_MULTI_SZ, and then click OK. When the Data dialog box appears, type the name or names of the services that you prefer to start before this service with one entry for each line, and then click OK.

The name of the service you would enter in the Data dialog box is the exact name of the service as it appears in the registry under the Services key.

When the computer starts, it uses this entry to verify that the service or services listed in this value are started before attempting to start the dependent service.

Warning Adding this entry manually may prevent the system from starting properly if you establish a “circular dependency.” In its simplest form, such a problem would occur when you make two differing services dependent on one another.