Real World Computing

I've been chasing a simple attachment issue in Lotus Notes 8.5.1 with IBM support for a while now but we're not really getting "engagement" yet. I thought I'd document it and see if we're the only ones with this problem. The Problem What we've discovered is that if we attach a file using a Lotus Notes 8.5.1 client, everything behaves as per normal in the Notes client but if we use a web browser to look at the NotesDocument, the file name disappears. It's best illustrated. On the left, you can see how the attachment renders in the Notes client using a standard discussion database. On the right, you can see how it renders in the web browser. There is no filename. It's not white-on-white, it's simply not there. Our Parameters It only happens when we use Lotus Notes 8.5.1 clients, but it's not a problem with 8.5 I've only tested the problem on Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 It happens on lots of computers, regardless of brand, conf...

It has been a busy week for disaster recovery so far - we had an outage on Monday and we had another one today. Monday's Email Outage On Monday, we lost our e-mail services. No, it had nothing to do with the Lotus Domino server. That was fine. At first, it looked as if we'd forgotten to renew our domain name. This was quickly followed with a back and forward check of various DNS services out there on the Web, our domain registrar and our Internet service providers. All seemed ok with our domain name but there was definitely something weird happening. Eventually we discovered that our Internet service provider had their DNS running off a domain which they had forgotten to renew. Since they were providing our primary DNS, all of our inbound mail was getting confused when it went to resolve our domain. After being told by us (yes, they were unaware of the situation despite the fact that it had occurred during the night and it wasn't noticed immediately in the morning), th...

Some time ago, Graham Dodge posted a great discussion point on business partners and brand loyalty. (See: When is an IBM Business Partner not a real partner ). Today, I got to experience this first hand. Today, we had a discussion about Active Directory. It's something we need to install, mainly to tick the business continuity box, and not something I'm particularly keen on. It's a messy rip and replace job with very little business gain. As is often the case for Microsoft products, there's no upgrade path. That's right, we're going from Old Microsoft product to New Microsoft product and the only way to do it is to throw our baby out with the bathwater and start again. I'm not happy, but it's no worse than I expected. Messy Introductions Our contact arrived during a painful ISP outage (more on those amazing adventures in a different post - soon). We explained about the outage and he started telling us about how he'd been head hunted by them and...