Been Real Busy

I have been really busy in the last year.  I am now the sole U.S. administrator of Lotus Notes, RIM Blackberry Enterprise Server, IronPort, PGP Universal Server, McAfee Secure Content Manager, to name a few.  I will try and post more once I get certain projects now going on out of the way.

Adding NOTES.INI parameters via Desktop policy

  In order to add NOTES.INI parameters into your users NOTES.INI files, you must modify the Desktop Policy document using the Designer. I am doing this in V7, I am sure it works in V6, but I am not sure about before V6. We wanted to pass down a parameter to suppress the dialog on users desktops whenever anyone tries to send an email encrypted and chose an Internet address to send to. In a nutshell, we have a button which we built into our client which secures an email onto another server in the DMZ and sends the Internet recipient an https link to the message which allows them to access our server, login and read the message without the contents being sent over the Internet. The problem was that if anyone inside the company got the email, it would be sent to them without any encryption. So, to fix that, we want to encrypt the email when they press the button and suppress the warning message stating that the recipient would receive an unencrypted email using the MAIL_SKIP_NOKEY_DIALOG=1 parameter.

American / United Airlines

We are in the 21st century and we are in planes manufactured in the latter half of the 20th century. I have been using American recently, but I suspect that the same goes with United Airlines as well. A cross country trip in a 757. I was disappointed in the technology offered by the airline. My trip from San Diego to Denver on Frontier offered more technology with the exception of the single class cabin and a pay for view DirecTV. I wasn’t about to pay 5 dollars for less than 2 hours of viewing. There was a time that American and United were the power horses of the airline industry. Hopefully, with the introduction of the new Airbus airplane recently, we will get some new offerings of some technology.

Blacks on TV victimized

My wife pointed out the other day that there seem to be some major characters on some popular shows being victimized recently. CSI:NY Dr. Sheldon Hawkes being accused of murder, Criminal Minds’ Derek Morgan and the Unit’s Hector Williams. This may be all coincidence, but all these shows occurred pretty close to each other – within about a week or two. Just a strange observance.

Wireless Reconcile Missing in Blackberry’s Email Reconciliation Options

We recently had an issue with a Blackberry that two options were not appearing in the Email Reconcilation options under Messaging: On Conflict and Wireless Reconcile. Usually the fix is:

1) Go to Main Screen –> Options–> [Advanced Options] (if necc.) –> Service Books and delete Desktop [CMIME]

2) Either connect your Blackberry to your desktop if you have Desktop Manager and the Handheld software installed or have the BES administrator Re-send the Service Books to you.

After I could not get this to work, I called RIM. We tried a Security Wipe on the Blackberry, removed user from the BES and going through the Enterprise Activation to no avail. We used the low level format program Javaloader.exe to format the Blackberry and did the same to the same results. The final resolution was kind of scary. RIM suggested to bring down the BES and rename and remove the BlackberryProfiles.nsf from the server and restart the server. The BlackberryProfile database gets rebuilt and the Service Books got pushed down.

Fun with DST

Oh, boy! Aren’t we having fun with the Daylight Saving Time (DST) issue? The agents for Lotus Notes are going to be released in the version 4 by close of business today. In order to patch for the DST issue, you need to apply a Windows server patch, a Windows desktop patch and run an agent to fix the bad entries in the address book between March 11 and April 1 (2am) and October 28th and November 4th (2am). We have been testing both Windows Server 2000 and 2003 as well as Windows 2000 and XP. so far we have the patches on the server and the client on both and now we just need to run the agent on the test mail file to see if it corrects the entries. The issue in Lotus Notes is that the display of the Notes calendar entries appear an hour later than were originally scheduled. For example, a meeting scheduled for March 14 for 7am appears in the Calendar view for 8am, but when you open the entry, it still says 7am. The agent is supposed to modify all entries within those dates. I plan on running it as a background task if possible.

Blackberrys are in the same boat.  We are on server 4.0.3 and need to be on 4.0.6 or 4.1.1 in order to relably push out the forthcoming patch to the smart phones.

Sametime 7.5 needs to be patched, but previous versions do not have to be.

So I am having fun.  Nothing like waiting for the last minute to roll out these fixes.

Miami International Airport

For the last couple of years, I have taken my annual vacation down to St. Croix flying through MIA.  When I first started going down to the Caribbean, I used to fly through San Juan, Puerto Rico.  My wife does not like going on small airplanes so we changed to the Miami flight.  One year when we were snowed out, we rebooked and had to spend the night in San Juan.  We made the mistake of staying at the San Juan Airport Hotel.  It looked like a cheap motel and the rooms were not really clean. We chose it since we had an early morning flight out. Miami is better to stay in, however, why is it that American Airlines is spread across 5 terminals?  We came in at the A Concorse and had to fly out of the E Concourse.  It is a 20 minute walk with some moving walk ways.  I am surprised that there is no transportation between concorses.  Last year, we were late coming in and had to run between B and D in order to get to our connection which took us 10 minutes of running with me carrying 2 heavy carry-ons and a shoulder bag while my family ran ahead to catch the flight.  Dallas Fort-Worth has the best airport with their monorail that goes between the terminals.  Denver is pretty good with their system.  Is there any sort of transportation scheduled for between terminals in MIA?

Vacation! St. Croix, U.S.V.I.

I have not written in awhile and am currently on vacation in St. Croix. We have been coming down to St. Croix for 13 or so years now every Christmas and staying at a resort called The Buccaneer. It is a family friendly resort with golf, tennis and beach activities. I will try and explain the resort as best as I can:

Obtaining LAN Username

I have been trying to find a way to pull in the LAN username for users. Here it is:

DIM NDS as Variable
DIM UserName as STRING
SET NDS = CreateObject(  "WScript.Shell" )
UserName = NDS.ExpandEnvironmentStrings( "%USERNAME%" )

The above was an extract of a program which I asked for and received from the LNotes-L list. Here is the full script which gives some more info about your machine:

Rebuilding Lotus Notes Inbox If Messages Were Removed

Here is LotusScript to rebuild your inbox if messages are in your All Documents and not in any other folder: