IBM is hosting an Open Mic conference call with Lotus Development and Support Engineering to discuss “Notes Upgrade and Deployment Best Practices”.
The Open Mic call will be held on Wednesday, October 6. The call will take place at 11:00 AM EDT (15:00 GMT) and will last for 1 hour. This call is designed to be an open question & answer format, so bring your questions.
Refer to the following technote for phone and web conference details:
Technote: 1433026
Title: Open Mic Q&A: Notes Upgrade & Deployment Best Practices - October 6th, 2010
Subject: Using setup.txt when ID Vault and mail file are on different servers
Hi,
We’re an academic institution so the client can be installed on computers that are not directly under our control. It is frequently the case that our top-level domain is not in the DNS suffixes that are used in the TCPIP/network control panel in Windows.
When using the ConfigFile=setup.txt there is the option to set the Domino.Server, Name, Port and Address feature. I’ve found that installing the Notes client on a machine that does not ‘Append this DNS suffix’ that if I set the setup.txt to point to the ID Vault so that the setup will pick up the users ID, it then is unable to find the path to the mail server as it only asks for the server by common name and not FQDN. If I set the setup.txt to use the mail server address instead, then it can’t find the ID vault server.
and the client is launched for first time setup then it’ll find the user’s ID file but when it goes to try and open the mailfile from Mail1/Test it will only search for it using the common name Mail1. (If I’m on the same network and have the .somewhere.com being appended to my DNS searches then great, but most of our users arent). What will happen is it’ll fail to find the server and set the Location documents mail file location to ‘username’ and not ‘mail\username’.
I’ve tried various tricks such as including connection documents in the pernames.ntf so that when the names.nsf gets created it’ll have some predefined connection docs but that stage happens later in the initial client setup so won’t work.
The only ‘trick’ I’ve found that works (and absolutely sucks from an IT perspective) is to use the Transform editor to add lines to the users hosts file during the client install for the commonname of the mail1 and hub1 servers and their IP addresses. I know that this is 100% the wrong thing to do but during initial client setup your current code completely fails to find the servers by asking for the FQDN from the initial server listed in the ConfigFile.
So how do I work around that issue correctly without lame hacks to the hosts file?
FQDN is in the server document on the Basics > Full qualified internet host name field and also under Ports > Notes network ports.
I can watch the setup occuring on the ‘Lotus Notes’ splash screen in the top left and see it saying:
Checking for Mail1/Test on TCPIP using address ‘mail1’
At no point does it ask for the server by it’s FQDN. So it’ll set up the location document but for the Mailfile field it’ll put ‘username’ and not ‘mail\username’ and therefore none of the Mail icons will work (such as Open button), forwarding will fail and so on.
Been playing around with this some more and the only method that works so far is that I have to set the ConfigFile so that I’m pointing at mail1 and have to put a replica of the IDVault on that server as well.
That works fine except… I have two mail clusters, one for faculty/staff and another for students, so I’d need two different ConfigFiles (and therefore install packages) depending on what mail cluster their mail file is on.
Will you be releasing a complete uninstaller 8.5.1 uninstaller for windows 7? I was wanting to test 8.5.2 on my machine, but I have tried now for weeks to completely uninstall Notes admin 8.5.1 multiuser from my machine without any success. Supports has had me search through the registry deleting keys. But no matter what I do when I try to upgrade to Notes 8.5.2 I keep receiving the error that Notes 8.5.1 multiuser is still installed.
Subject: Runas will not allow upgrading from 6.5.4
We have 3000 users to upgrade from 6.5.4. After months of trying to use smartupgrade, we were told be support that it does not support upgrading to 8.x using Runas. We cannot upgrade if we are forced to buy a third party app. Is this true or is there another way to work around the Runas limitation?
I posted this question in the chat during the Open Mic:
So is the IBM recommended Notes client configuration multi-user with managed replicas? We are still using node (network) Notes client and need to change this so making sure we have a recommended supported configuration moving forward.
Response I got was “Yes”.
This is fine for users that have dedicated PCs but we have many users on KIOSK-type PCs, such as in conference rooms, so what is the recommend configuration for users that may use a different PC every day? Is the Roaming functionality in Notes/Domino the way to configure these users?
We need to re-architect how we have Lotus Notes clients installed and want to make sure it is the correct setup moving forward. We need to take into account users with dedicated PCs or laptops, users that move from PC to PC and users that might utilize both scenarios.
In the situation where user’s are not tied to a specific machine and you are using Windows login accounts unique for each user then installing Notes in multiuser mode and turning on Notes Roaming is a perfect solution.
In 8.5.2 you can even host your roamed files on a network share which will feel very similar to your current node install.
More information about multiuser mode and Notes roaming can be found in the product documentation and in the Notes wiki.
We have a large number of users on 8.0.2 using single sign on. We are going to upgrade them to 8.5.2 and we want to enable shared login.
In order to enable shared login we need to remove the old sso. We can disable it by running scripts to remove the sso dll and disable the service but we can’t remove the selection for sso in the install.
When we try to complete the upgrade in silent mode it reinstalls the SSO from the currently installed features.
Running the 8.5.1 installer with the REMOVE parameter for the sso works. Which is viable for any users needing to move to 8.5.2 and shared login, as we can run the 8.5.1 installer first before the upgrade. Trying the same thing with the 8.0.2 installer doesn’t work.
Is there any way to acheive this in one step whilst doing the 8.5.2 upgrade?
Subject: Design update of names, desktop, and bookmark following installation of 8.5.x
I’ve been doing lots of testing upgrading from 6.5.4 to 8.5.x and I’ve had mixed results with the migration of the names, bookmarks, and desktop files following the first startup of the notes client following it’s installation. Sometimes the bookmark and desktop converts correctly to the new template but the names does not. Could someone please explain this process in more detail and suggest a best practice for this? We’re going from a single user to a multi user installation. We uninstall the 6.5.4 client before installing the new 8.5.x client.
We’d also like to keep the old notes.ini to keep as much of the configuration as possible. I know that we have to change the Directory line and add the SharedDataDirectory line for it to work as a multi user installation. Is there anything else that needs to be modified in the notes.ini for 8.5.x or will the client take care of that on it’s own?
On the conference call the Lotus engineers said that as long as Setup=1 and TemplateSetup=1 then the client should upgrade the design of the databases on first setup, whether the DB has the inherit design set or not. Hopefully that’s true although I was seeing R5 design address books on 8.5 clients.
That’s a much easier fix although I cannot state whether that would have fixed in our setup (too late to go back and verify).
Hi David,
I had the same issue. When I looked into it further I found that all the problem address books did not have Inherit Design From Master Template > Template Name field filled out on the Design tab of the address book’s property field.
In the end I added custom code to the mail file design to run in the Database Open script that set the master template name for the address book (and bookmark.nsf) correctly. That way when the initial client setup runs and it does the ‘upgrading the design of your databases’ it correctly upgrades them.
(If the client has already been upgraded you can set the notes.ini variable TemplateSetup equal to 1 (as it’s usually set to the current client version) and the next time the client runs it will upgrade the local databases and set the TemplateSetup field back to the version number (e.g. 805001 or similar).
Let me know if you want a copy of the code so you can include in your mail template.
thisemailwillworkuntil10thOctober@rhsmith.umd.edu
(I’d rather not post my real address for spam bots to harvest…)
I’ve gone over my Smart Upgrade setup over and over, but can’t get it to work. Would support go through it with me if I called and requested support for this. I am a valid customer with a Support ID.