I was having a discussion with a friend of mine one day about job conditions, technical issues and Domino servers and R5.
He told me that he had a problem with his enterprise server: The one and only administration ID was expired and he was unable to operate the server running on Solaris 8.
I told him that there must be a warning message when an administrator makes changes on the server. He said, yes, and that he thought that the warning (and results) would not affect the server in any way and ignored it. Now what was he to do?
His shop had 232 databases for different Web-based applications and almost 500 e-mail clients. So I told him to change the system date to the day before the admin ID expired and then to recertify it. He changed the date, but he was unable to recertify. After a while on the phone, I realized that no cert.nsf databases existed on the server.
That was the biggest stupid mistake he made. He didn't have the registered server/user certification history maintained, and hadn't kept track of users or such things. Note that they had seven virtual servers and 24 organization Certifier IDs.
So with the little experience that I have with R5, I told him to create a certification database on the server by using a server template -- then try to recertify his admin ID and other IDs as well. He did that and was able to recover from the unmanageable solution.
The next day, I visited his site and found out that there were many user IDs that were expired, and there were inconsistent ACLs throughout his databases. I also discovered that not all the databases were accessible through the admin ID. So I selecte
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d the complete databases and applied manager access to all databases using the Manage ACL option. The result was few successful and many failed databases because of denied access.
Again, with my little experience, I told him to apply the same ACL on every database by opening the database through the respective ID files and assign them access to the admin ID. The user mail file sizes were 399 to 550 MB. The hard disks were running out of space, and he didn't have the third-party software for managing the sizes of those user mail databases. (And I was unable to give him the solution through only R-5 itself.)
He was also facing the difficulty of real-time data-pulling from Oracle database while the connectivity was proper through DECS, because on every query, the Oracle server started dumping the database of the Domino database rather than having the only requirement be for a view interface through Lotus server.
So after searching on different Domino forums and Notes domains etc., I came to know that R5 has its limitations, and he needed to upgrade to ND6 to solve this issue. One of their Domino developers actually had to resign due to the fact that he couldn't make management's deadline to design an application that does not dump the data on a Lotus server but instead allows you to view it through the server.
So I questioned myself: Is this the limitation of the software itself or something else? Was it the developer? (I think the first case was the reason.)
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