A while back, an acquaintance of mine asked me to explain how email addresses work. Although the concepts are easy enough to understand, he’d never really “got it”, and so asked me for help.
Email addresses are built up from three parts; a recipient, a server and a top level domain node (TLD). The address is formatted much like this: recipient@server.tld. If this was an address for regular mail, it’d look like this:
Recipient
Server
TLD
It’s easiest to think of the server part of the address as the street name and number, and the TLD as the zip code.
Blog
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Understanding email addresses
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Decrypting Lotus Notes’ NSD crash logs.
When Lotus Notes crashes, it usually also creates a crash log. Much like the tapes from the black box of an airplane, the crash log can yield veluable information, provided you can read it. The crash logs are named in a very specific way, such as nsd_W32I_XP-UNME_2009_03_11@08_35_17.log, easily allowing us to find the log we need.
The problem is that the logs are, mildly put, overfilled with information, logging all of the files Notes uses, the processes running at the time of the crash and so on. These files are raw text data, containing some 30000+ lines of information, taking up roughly 2MB of space.
For years, Notes consultants have clamored for a tool to ease the reading of these files; and IBM has seen fit to acquiesce; they have published the Lotus Notes Diagnostic Tool.
The Lotus Notes Diagnostic Tool, found here, analyses the file, and tells you what you need to know, along with links to knowledge base articles. You still have to decide upon a plan of action yourself, but at least now you don’t have to search some 30000+ lines of error logs to find what the error was… -
Notes crashes when you delete a folder using the delete key
I’ve been having a problem lately while doing some housekeeping in my mail file; Notes would crash whenever I’d delete a folder using the delete key instead of right-clicking the folder and selecting “Remove Folder”. Each crash would result in a 2MB-sized crash log.
I shipped the crash log off to one of our senior Notes consultants, who returned the following extract to me:
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### thread 1/19: [ NLNOTES: 0b88: 01d8] FATAL THREAD (Panic)
### FP=0013c74c, PC=7c90eb94, SP=0013c6e8
### stkbase=00140000, total stksize=212992, used stksize=14616
### EAX=0x02d40000, EBX=0x00000000, ECX=0x00001000, EDX=0x7c90eb94
### ESI=0x000004a0, EDI=0x00000000, CS=0x0000001b, SS=0x00000023
### DS=0x00000023, ES=0x00000023, FS=0x0000003b, GS=0x00000000 Flags=0x00000297
############################################################
What this extract is telling us, is that NLNOTES.EXE is encountering a fatal error. The solution? Reinstall Lotus Notes. -
Outlook runs slowly
I was contacted by a user telling me that Outlook was running slowly on his computer, especially when switching between Mail and Contacts, etc. He also reported that when he had Outlook open, he didn’t get the speed he was supposed to while surfing the web.
The problem was simply that Outlook was set to check with the Exchange Server constantly. To avoid this problem, you need to turn Cached Mode on. Here’s how:
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The importance of logging as much information as possible.
In my last post, I wrote about one of my recent support tickets. What annoys me about that ticket is that I could have solved it a lot sooner, if only the tech that had logged the call had taken down more information that “Video replay doesn’t work”.
When logging a support ticket, especially when you are going to pass it on to another tech, it is important to log as much information as possible. I’m not telling you to write the Great American Novel, but if you properly log what the problem is, when it occurred, and what has been done to resolve the problem, you solve two potential problems:
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Inverted colors in Windows Media Player running in Internet Explorer
A user logged a support ticket, saying that she was having problems playing streaming video in Internet Explorer. According to the ticket, it “doesn’t work”. The user would be away from work, but had left her passwords “in a secure place” (read: under her keyboard)…
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I went to her computer, logged on, and tested a few video sites such as YouTube etc. I was unable to reproduce the problem. I sent the user a message, telling her to contact me when she returned to work.
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When she returned, I had a look at her computer. It turned out that her problem wasn’t that it didn’t work, but rather that the colors were all distorted and inverted-looking. The error only occured on sites that streamed video for replay in Windows Media Player.
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I checked out what version of WMP she was running, and predictably enough, she was running an ancient version of WMP. Armed with this knowledge, I updated WMP, and lo and behold; the problem was gone. -
Adding a Twitter feed to Blogspot
One of the big things of today is micro-blogging. If you don’t know what it is, think of Facebook, and then think of the status field in Facebook. Strip most of the other functionality away. That’s microblogging. In other words; microblogging is responding to the question “What are you doing right now?”
I’ve got an account at Twitter (my nick there is @razumny), and wanted the last two entries to be displayed in the sidebar of my personal blog. Here’s how I did it:
First, you’ll want to find the RSS-feed address for your twitter feed. If you go to your twitter feed page, you’ll see a link at the bottom of the sidebar on the right side, like so:
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Five tips for getting better support
A while back, I wrote about giving better support to users. This time, I’m turning the tables; here are five tips to get better support: (more…)
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Resolving Stop: 0x7b errors
Here’s what happened: I had three computers to install, same make and model on each of them. I hooked them up to the network, and started the RIS install. Files load to the computer, no problem, then the computer reboots.
Immediately after the setup starts, the computer goes to bluescreen, claiming a Stop: 0x7b error.
Checking around the web a little, I find that a 0x7b stop error is caused when the “configuration is missing a component that is required to boot your device”.
Adding to this the knowledge that the computer was running a SATA hard drive, I went to the BIOS, where I found that the computers were set to Enhanced mode for the drive in question.
Now there’s your problem. It cleared up nicely as soon as I switched to Compatible mode. -
Lotus Notes: "You are not authorized to access this database"
The error message “You are not authorized to access this database” is caused by a lack of rights set in Notes’ ACL, Access Control List. When this error message is displayed, the administrator of the ACL will have to change the permissions of the user in question. -
KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid
The number one biggest error many techs make when diagnosing problems for users, be it on the phone or on site, is going the complicated route. There is a reason why most ISPs have a script for their 1st tier techs to follow, to make sure that the basic errors have been corrected.
While I was an apprentice, I was called out to solve a print problem for a user. The user had a printer connected to her computer with a USB cable, and all the cables were connected. The printer in question didn’t have much in terms of diagnostic lights and such.
I head out to the user, and start troubleshooting. I try everything I can think of; print spooler, drivers, ports etc., and find myself no nearer to a solution half an hour later. Then I decide to check the back of the printer…
Sure enough, the power switch in the back had been toggled, probably by the cleaning staff.
The point of my story is that had I checked basic stuff first, that half hour hadn’t been wasted. The moral: Keep It Simple, Stupid