Hi All,
I’ve recently taken over, at very short notice, as the administrator for our Domino Servers. I’ve yet to have any training on the subject, so am having to learn on the run. I’ve managed to get to grips with most day to day tasks, but one issue that I can’t sort out is a daily failure message on the server log saying “Unable to run program Drop.EXE: Unable to locate program”.
Scanning many forums, blogs, FAQ’s doesn’t throw any light on the problem. The one hit I’ve found is from 2004 on the Domino 6/7 forum which suggested using “nserver” in the program name rather than “drop” and “-c “drop all”” in the parameters rather than “all”. Unfortunately this didn’t work for me.
I’ve tried deleting the original Server/Program reference and re-creating it, just in case it was an authority issue with the outgoing administrator, but that didn’t work. I’ve also tried running the “drop” command from the console to drop all my profiles sessions, but this didn’t appear to drop anything, and didn’t report any errors, so I’m not sure if failed or not.
I can only access the Domino Server via the Domino Administrator application, not directly on to the machine itself (hopefully to be sorted soon), so I’ve no way of seeing if “drop.exe” actually exists.
Just before I took on the role, the servers had been upgraded to 9.0, so there is no log history to show if this has been going on for a while, or has started as a result of the upgrade.
Any information or advice would be appreciated.
Subject: No drop.exe with Domino 9
I agree with Mark. To me it sounds like a mis-configured program document where they wanted to issue a drop command but they set it up incorrectly. I’d have to question why you would want to do that via program doc(but that’s a different story).
Drop.exe (or ndrop.exe) is not something that ships with Domino 9.x . It could be, however, something that was developed in house. Since the exe is no longer available (nor does it exist out of the box) I would check for the existence of a program document and if one is found I would disable it (or delete it)
Subject: Re: Problem with “Drop.exe”
Hello JR
Could you provide us additional information about the Server/Program existing:
Program Name
Command Line
Best Regards!
Rodrigo
Subject: Many thanks
Many thanks for the replies guys. It’s helped a lot.
The DROP commands are set up in Domino administrator under Server\Status\Schedules\Programs. The entries are times to run just before a COMPACT command and also just before a REPLICA command.
It looks as if Riccado has spotted the flaw with the schedule. DROP.exe doesn’t ship with Domino 9 !!!
For the moment I’ll delete the schedule entries, at least that will get rid of the error messages. As I learn more about Administration, I’ll see if there is a better way of doing what the schedule was trying to achieve.
Subject: Look into DBMT
Since you are running Domino 9.x you can take advantage of the new feature DBMT. It basically makes maintenance in Domino so much easier. The actual dbmt process will issue a drop command to drop the database prior to running maintenance on it which basically takes care of the problem of having to do a “drop all” on a server via program doc.
Subject: For what it’s worth…
You didn’t mention - when you see the error ‘drop.exe. doesn’t exist’, can you tie it directly to the running of a program document? ie, does the error occur when the program document should be running?
I don’t have a 9.x server, but drop.exe doesn’t exist on 8.5.3 (which is what 9.0 is under the covers)
If you’re using the Admin Client console, and issue a ‘drop all’, it’s been my experience that your connection to the console is dropped as well, so you should be able to test that pretty easily.
And… finally, I had some issues with Program Docs early on, and if this is a Windows server, i would suggest:
Program Name: nserver
Command Line: -c “drop all”
Hope this helps!
Subject: Cheers for the pointer…
Thanks for that Riccardo, I’ll have a look at DBMT.