Thursday, June 7, 2012

SnTT - Traveler Lookups, DA and Multiple Servers

Since this came up today figured it might help others troubleshoot their Lotus Notes Traveler lookups.

In the client case, Traveler sits on the home mail server, they also have some secondary servers where mail sits as well.
Clients of the home mail server can lookup employees and through using the DA (Directory Assistance), they can look up clients contact details as well. A nice solution that beats their old Blackberry way of copying around files and then local synching but that is history.

As we updated some of the secondary mail servers and users to Traveler, we found they were not able to lookup the clients.

For those that did not know it, Traveler can look at your home mail server or at a specific server for information (See this wiki page). Since the client wants full emergency options, they have traveler setup, but turned off for all but the main server. So that means we need to set each server as though it ran Traveler. Else we would use the notes.ini file setting NTS_TRAVELER_AS_LOOKUP_SERVER=Trueas described int he wiki.

So the steps are of course, create the da.nsf file add your server information and file to be used and set it to enabled.
Make sure you replicate the da.nsf to all servers involved and check the ACL of course to include the servers.you will need
Enter the da.nsf into the server document file on the 1st tab of the server document where it asks about Directory Assistance and all the other servers as well.
Restart the Domino server.

You can check if it is set properly by typing show xdir at a server console. If you see only one entry for the names.nsf you missed something.

You can also run show xdir reload when making adjustments to the DA settings.

Simple enough but if you never knew Traveler looked to the local server you would be left scratching yoru head like my client who was not as versed in Traveler.

Traveler really is that simple and great and there is no excuse for not using it no matter the size of your environment. Oh and Traveler is Free.

2 comments:

  1. Actually, if you set up da on the BES all the Blackberry users can do lookups against those databases. We have our CRM database in DA and it works great. And the BB users get all the fields, not just those Apple and Traveler choose to sync.

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  2. This is true. However the client had been doing this convoluted thing for as much as 10 years! before we got involved with them. the previous IT person created job security so much they fired him. He hacked so many things that the upgrade was not going to be so smooth. This was just one more thing which I explained they could have been doing all along as you pointed out, but they appreciated our upfront honesty and was part of how we got the project.

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