SnTT - When your name is no longer your name

Welcome back everyone from the long weekend here in the US, UK and some other places as well.

What we have here is a failure to follow the simplest rule in the book and a little empathy needed by admins until IBM enhances the rename function in Domino.

KISS - Keep it simple, seriously

The Eclipse client, better known as the Standard one in the Lotus R8 stream brought many changes, one of which really bothers me and unfortunately there is nothing I can do about it. Maybe Mary Beth Raven's team can.

I have multiple mail files, corp, private, test user, other customers, etc.

In past versions, and in basic mode, changing the title, in Database properties of the mail file or db in question changes the name in the tab as well when the window is open and that's how I always knew which mail file I was in.

Well no longer and it is really annoying to me in my day to day work.

So why do I bring this up? One of our customers called this morning and was having problems with someone's name showing up incorrectly in their tab using their maiden name.

We walked through how the admin had changed the name(created a new ID insteasd of using rename for some unknown reason, probably lack of knowledge) and they did a good job, we made sure ACL's and location documents got changed. Checked groups and ID and all seemed fine.

They called back a little later and asked how to change the mail tab to get the new name. They had checked the title properties of the db and changed it so what is wrong?

My brain hurt from my recent experience with our ISP, so I asked on Twitter and Andy Donaldson pointed out to me we should check the Mail-Owner under More-preferences.

EDITED 5/27: Marie reminded me to include the ability to set this also when inside DWA if you are using webmail. Sorry, forgot that addition.

Sure enough her old name was still listed.

Ok, that resolves her problem. But who thought this was a good idea? Sometimes people want to provide original titles to their mail files, why does the Eclipse client prevent this?

Something so simple has gone awry. Why can't the tab still call the properties title up and use it?

A secondary aspect of this customer is this.

If someone changes their name, for whatever reason, and wants all references to their previous name erased from what they see why isn't there an option to change the mail file name as well as the user name?

So in true Web 2.0 fashion, there should be an option in the Admin client when performing a user rename to ask if we want the file name changed too. A posting from Paul Davies on ideajam.net has this already and has 90 approvals and is from Jan 2008!

So go vote for it and think about how you can make someone's life easier, especially if they are getting divorced and don't want to get reminded of their previous name and life.

An error you can't find in Google, SPR however

Do I like this? Oh No I do not!
My apologies to Dr. Seuss fans but weird errors that don't even exist on Google can be rather hard to troubleshoot don't you think?

Fear not, we have screen shot it, although you may need to expand them to better see it.

Before I begin, the situation is this:
R8.0.X client was updated to 8.5 Standard, but because of older equipment made an ini change to run in Basic mode.

The errors only appeared today, not of course last week when I updated them.

The error shown above is what was happening when the client first opened Notes. I was able to "break in" so to speak and get her connected again to the server and replicate her mail.

Problem was if she opened her PNAB(personal names.nsf) on her machine it would start with the error above. Then after clicking ok, you would see this error:

Loading Applications Status
CWPCA4006E: Exception while attempting to load application:nrpc:/__852572890061A02B/composite.xml?file=names.nsf&name=Notes%20Contacts%20Application.xml&caxmlts=Fri, 13 Feb 2009 19:37:00 GMT&launchUrl=notes%3A%2F%2F%2F852572890061A02B%2FContacts%26Groups%3FOpenFrameset%26or1flg%3D32%26hashId%3D05842910E1AACE76230B0F7F7603E854

How odd I thought, an Eclipse error in a Basic client. Hmm. On top of which it looked like a Standard client. Searching Google for CWPCA errors and such showed zero as did IBM support and some fellow colleagues. Stump 1, stump them all....BLOG it.

Called IBM support, John (Thanks for the quick reolution too) worked on it for me and what we found was the notes.ini setting was entered incorrectly to run the client in Basic mode. The proper line entry is:
UseBasicNotes=1 ours, while close, was incorrect.

This resolved the error.

Now there is an SPR out on this error and although I am one of few who received it, nothing as yet has been published about it nor that it is being fixed in future releases. No wonder as we created the problem, a hybrid Basic/Standard client.
But a technote would be nice, so until then, I guess this is your Technote.

As an aside we discussed the possibility of deleting the Workspace folder which would be recreated when running Standard mode as a fix for some other Eclipse corruptions. Which is good because it just so happens my 8.5 installation has some issues, which while I reported them, have not been found by others. Maybe it's just Vista :-)

Sometimes the PC is mightier than the User

As some of you may know, I twittered today that I had a hell of a time trying to resolve a number of issues on my laptop(yes it's Vista, but it's not usually a problem) which unfortunately manifested itself in my Lotus Notes client and Sametime clients.
Good news. Resolved all of it, will show how in a minute.
Bad news, Looks like Microsoft's fault. When I went to shut my laptop down to reboot it suddenly pops up and says I have 16 (!?) updates to install before reboot.

So the problem I have been seeing the last 2 weeks or so which finally caused all out war in my laptop was a Microsoft update?

And you wonder why I write about them the way I do. Look, I am getting this much closer to a linux laptop, like these!

So how to resolve anomalies that appear out of nowhere and may be Microsoft caused?

1) Sametime passwords suddenly stopped getting saved. This was I thought a Java problem as Sametime8 is eclipsed based and the answer as posted in the Sametime Forum is:

Close the client, delete the following and restart the client, enter the passwords and settings, close the client and restart it:

C:\Documents and Settings\\Application
Data\Lotus\Sametime\.metadata\.plugins\com.ibm.rcp.security.auth\*
C:\Documents and Settings\\Application
Data\Lotus\Sametime\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.runtime\.setting
s\com.ibm.rcp.security.auth.ui.prefs

2) Trying to install R8.5 Beta(802 never wanted to install on my vista laptop but maybe now it will) and kept getting this error or a variation of it and it would stop everything.


Now the highly esteemed Nathan Freeman posted the "hard way" of clearing your pc. EDITED 8/26/08 FOUND IT:

Here is the link!
Suffice it to say you need to delete almost any reference to eclipse or rcp in your system and then reboot and install.
My temp directory had a 1.5gb eclipse directory. So now I have more free space and a working version of 8.5 beta code.

All's well that end's well, now to finish my Domino.doc to Quickr migration.