The Lotus Notes Client Install and Setup Team Blog http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/ en-us Mon, 14 May 2012 12:00:42 -0400 Mon, 14 May 2012 12:00:42 -0400 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/ibm-lotus-notes-file-versions IBM Lotus Notes File versions Jeff Mitchell http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/ibm-lotus-notes-file-versions?opendocument&comments http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/ibm-lotus-notes-file-versions
This is a table of all the File versions, sizes and time/date stamps for nlnotes.exe going back to V604 which is when we started putting file versions on.  

Interesting note is you can see how we've evolved our versioning strategy over time with respect to fixpacks (ugh it took us til v6.5.4FP1 to get it right?)


Release     Version          Size         Date        Time
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
V604        6.0.40.4152      1036337      6-01-2004   10:19:34
V605        6.0.50.5086      1044529      3-28-2005   7:39:18
V651        6.5.10.4008      1036337      1-21-2004   17:43:18
V651DSF1    6.5.10.4075      1036337      3-16-2004   10:42:21
V652FP1     6.5.20.4319      1036337      11-15-2004  13:21:18
V653        6.5.30.4258      1040433      9-15-2004   4:39:40
V653CPP1    6.5.30.4315      1040433      11-11-2004  6:35:24
V653FP1     6.5.30.4350      1040433      12-16-2004  6:29:30
V654FP1     6.5.41.5170      1044529      6-20-2005   4:41:05
V654FP2     6.5.42.5255      1044529      9-13-2005   19:10:34
V654FP3     6.5.43.6009      1044529      1-10-2006   5:46:05
V655        6.5.50.5334      1044529      12-01-2005  8:27:06
V655FP1     6.5.51.6101      1044529      4-12-2006   4:14:03
V655FP3     6.5.53.7081      1044529      3-23-2007   4:03:29
V656        6.5.60.7065      1044529      3-07-2007   8:28:18
V656FP1     6.5.61.7114      1044529      4-25-2007   13:23:46
V656FP2     6.5.62.7290      1044529      10-18-2007  8:34:02
V656FP3     6.5.63.8087      1044529      3-28-2008   8:04:55
V70         7.0.0.5229       1110016      8-18-2005   10:27:26
V701        7.0.10.6017      1114112      1-18-2006   8:55:28
V701FP1     7.0.11.6107      1114112      4-18-2006   7:46:39
V702        7.0.20.6269      1114112      9-27-2006   6:30:12
V702FP1     7.0.21.7010      1114112      1-11-2007   8:20:45
V702FP2     7.0.22.7134      1114112      5-15-2007   5:39:14
V702FP3     7.0.23.7347      1114112      12-14-2007  10:34:21
V703        7.0.30.7269      1114112      9-27-2007   9:53:28
V703FP1     7.0.31.8055      1114112      2-25-2008   16:37:33
V704        7.0.40.9082      1114112      3-24-2009   12:35:39
V704FP1     7.0.41.9201      1114112      7-22-2009   11:15:01
V80         8.0.0.7214       2248704      8-03-2007   11:07:50
V801        8.0.10.8038      1287560      2-08-2008   16:29:16
V802        8.0.20.8220      2041224      8-08-2008   15:52:06
V802FP1     8.0.21.9012      2041224      1-13-2009   14:45:24
V802FP2     8.0.22.9173      2041224      6-23-2009   13:35:50
V802FP3     8.0.23.9281      2035712      10-09-2009  10:50:17
V802FP4     8.0.24.9344      2035712      12-11-2009  9:53:00
V802FP5     8.0.25.10103     2035712      4-14-2010   11:08:46
V802FP6     8.0.26.10196     2035712      7-16-2010   10:01:42
V85         8.5.0.8340       2647432      12-06-2008  9:35:25
V85FP1      8.5.1.9166       2647432      6-16-2009   14:07:33
V851        8.5.10.9271      1676680      9-29-2009   11:27:55
V851FP1     8.5.11.10005     1676680      1-06-2010   11:14:31
V851FP2     8.5.12.10076     1676680      3-18-2010   11:10:06
V851FP3     8.5.13.10143     1676680      5-24-2010   5:33:57
V851FP4     8.5.14.10206     1676680      7-26-2010   11:33:37
V851FP5     8.5.15.10272     1676680      9-30-2010   7:46:10
V852        8.5.20.10222     1680776      8-11-2010   10:24:45
V852FP1     8.5.21.10333     1680776      11-30-2010  7:18:13
V852FP2     8.5.22.11081     1680776      3-23-2011   5:34:18
V852FP3     8.5.23.11191     1680776      7-11-2011   8:09:26
V852FP4     8.5.24.11321     1680776      11-18-2011  7:23:35
V853        8.5.30.11258     1869192      9-16-2011   8:32:53
V853FP1     8.5.31.12067     1870984      3-08-2012   7:36:40
]]> http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dxcomments/ibm-lotus-notes-file-versions http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/ibm-lotus-notes-file-versions?opendocument&comments Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:13:22 -0400 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/hello-from-orlando Jeff Mitchell http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/hello-from-orlando?opendocument&comments http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/hello-from-orlando http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dxcomments/hello-from-orlando http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/hello-from-orlando?opendocument&comments Wed, 7 Dec 2011 07:43:58 -0400 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/combining-notes-8.5.3-and-sametime-8.5.2 Jeff Mitchell http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/combining-notes-8.5.3-and-sametime-8.5.2?opendocument&comments http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/combining-notes-8.5.3-and-sametime-8.5.2 this article about combining Notes 8.5.1 and Sametime 8.5 into a single kit.  For later versions of Sametime, this article is the recommended procedure. If you take a quick peek, you'll notice they recommend radically different procedures.  The older method details how to manually merge the Sametime bits into the Notes installer.  The later article recommends chaining the install kits for Notes and Sametime (hey that script looks familiar!).  I was curious if the older method would work for later versions of Notes so I tried it out.   Here are the steps I followed:


The following steps work best if run from a command prompt:

1. Create a working area on a drive with approximately 2 gigs of free space. For example use "C:\ComboKit"
mkdir C:\ComboKit
cd C:\ComboKit

2. Download the required installation kits:
Obtain the Notes 8.5.3 Notes client only web kit.  
Obtain the Sametime 8.5.2 Addon installer.  

3. Copy the downloaded files to the root of your work area.

4.  Extract the required files from the downloads:
Run the Sametime 8.5.2 Addon installer.  At the following dialog, select the 2nd option and change the installation path to the work area created in step 1.        
   
After the kit is extracted, click "Cancel" on the "Choose Setup Language" dialog box to exit the installation.  This will end the installation process before the Sametime Addon installer is run, and will leave the extracted kit contents in the specified directory.

   

Run the Notes 8.5.3 installer.  At the following dialog, select the 2nd option and change the installation path to the work area created in step 1.

After the kit is extracted, click "Cancel" on the "Lotus Notes 8.5.3 - Install Wizard" dialog box to exit the installation.  This will end the installation process before the Lotus Notes installer is run, and will leave the extracted kit contents in the specified directory.


5. Copy the required utilites.
In the directory where Notes 8.5.3 was extracted to there is a subdirectory named Utilities.  In this Utilities subdirectory there is a zip file named NotesCustomizationKit_1_0.zip,'
This archive contains a utility used to update the Notes installation kit.  It is called UpdateSiteMgr.exe. Extract it from the zip file and copy it to the root of the Notes extracted directory


6. Remove Sametime 8.5.1 from Notes 8.5.3 Install kit
Run the utility UpdateSiteMgr with the command line options "-r Sametime".  This command will take a bit of time.

Time passes...


7. Prepare the Sametime addon
Copy the existing Sametime addon update site to a new name: updateSite.zip
Copy the existing Sametime addon install manifest to a new name: install.xml


UPDATE:  It appears I was using the 8.5.4 version of UpdateSiteMgr which has a fix for a bug where some Sametime features are left in the manifest.  
As Christian points out in the comments below, the following lines need to be manually removed from the manifest before the install kit will work correctly.  Or you can use the 8.5.2 TrimUpateSite tool.

Around line 249 of deploy\install.xml remove these lines:
           feature download-size="195" id="com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.browser.feature" match="greaterOrEqual" shared="true" size="163" url="jar:${installer.root}/updateSite.zip!/" version="8.5.1.20110812-1126"/>
           feature download-size="286" id="com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.chat.logging.feature" match="greaterOrEqual" shared="true" size="254" url="jar:${installer.root}/updateSite.zip!/" version="8.5.1.20110812-1126"/>
           feature download-size="339" id="com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.core.feature" match="greaterOrEqual" shared="true" size="354" url="jar:${installer.root}/updateSite.zip!/" version="8.5.1.20110812-1126"/>
           feature download-size="582" id="com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.im.community.feature" match="greaterOrEqual" shared="true" size="550" url="jar:${installer.root}/updateSite.zip!/" version="8.5.1.20110812-1126"/>
           feature download-size="408" id="com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.messages.feature" match="greaterOrEqual" shared="true" size="376" url="jar:${installer.root}/updateSite.zip!/" version="8.5.1.20110812-1126"/>
           feature download-size="342" id="com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.people.feature" match="greaterOrEqual" shared="true" size="310" url="jar:${installer.root}/updateSite.zip!/" version="8.5.1.20110812-1126"/>
           feature download-size="206" id="com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.rtc.core.feature" match="greaterOrEqual" shared="true" size="201" url="jar:${installer.root}/updateSite.zip!/" version="8.5.1.20110812-1126"/>
           feature download-size="1358" id="com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.ui.feature" match="greaterOrEqual" shared="true" size="1392" url="jar:${installer.root}/updateSite.zip!/" version="8.5.1.20110812-1126"/>
           feature download-size="122" id="com.ibm.rcp.realtime.livenames.feature" match="greaterOrEqual" shared="true" size="90" url="jar:${installer.root}/updateSite.zip!/" version="8.5.1.20110812-1126"/>

8. Add the Sametime 8.5.2 to Notes 8.5.3
Run the UpdateSiteMgr utility to merge the Sametime update site to the Notes update site.

Verify the updateSite.zip and install manifest were modified:


9.  Run the new combined installer. ]]> http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dxcomments/combining-notes-8.5.3-and-sametime-8.5.2 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/combining-notes-8.5.3-and-sametime-8.5.2?opendocument&comments Fri, 14 Oct 2011 10:39:42 -0400 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/upgrading-pre-notes-8.5.3-to-notes-8.5.3-using-surunas-on-windows-7vista Jeff Mitchell http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/upgrading-pre-notes-8.5.3-to-notes-8.5.3-using-surunas-on-windows-7vista?opendocument&comments http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/upgrading-pre-notes-8.5.3-to-notes-8.5.3-using-surunas-on-windows-7vista

1. Copy file SUService.exe to the Notes installation location on the target machine. By default this directory is "C:\Program Files\IBM\Lotus\Notes".
   This can be done either directly on the machine or remotely.  An Administrative account is typically required to write to subdirectories under the "C:\Program Files" location.   The file SUService.exe will be installed as part of Notes 8.5.3 and can be copied directly from an installed version of Notes 8.5.3 to a network share, USB drive or other media.
   
2. Create and configure the service on the target machine.  
   There are several ways to manually create services.  This can be done either directly on the machine or remotely.  Windows ships with a built in utility that allows service creation locally or remotely if the user is a Administrator of the machine.   SC is the utility (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490995.aspx , http://support.microsoft.com/kb/251192 )  To create the Notes Smart Upgrade service locally an Administrative user would type in the following command into a command prompt.
                  sc create LNSUSvc binPath= "C:\Program Files\IBM\Lotus\Notes\SUService.exe" type= own type= interact start= auto error= normal displayName= "Lotus Notes Smart Upgrade Service"
   To create the same service remotely using the sc tool the Administrator would need to type the following command into a command prompt (where RemoteMachine is the name of the machine)
                  sc \\RemoteMachine create LNSUSvc binPath= "C:\Program Files\IBM\Lotus\Notes\SUService.exe" type= own type= interact start= auto error= normal displayName= "Lotus Notes Smart Upgrade Service"
   
3. Once the service has been successfully created, it must be started prior to use.  The SC tool can also be used to start a service, both locally and remotely.  The following command will start the Lotus Notes Smart Upgrade service.
                  Locally:   sc start LNSUSvc
                  Remotely: sc \\RemoteMachine start LNSUSvc
   
   
4. To verify that the service is created and started successfully, the SC utility can be leveraged as well.
                  Locally: sc query LNSUSvc
                  Remotely: sc \\RemoteMachine query LNSUSvc
   
   
5. Now that the target machine is ready to start the upgrade, the SUSetRunAsWizard would be run and the SURunAs.exe upgrade package would be generated as normal, using the SUSetRunAsWizard.exe from the Notes 8.5.3 Administrator install kit.

]]> http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dxcomments/upgrading-pre-notes-8.5.3-to-notes-8.5.3-using-surunas-on-windows-7vista http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/upgrading-pre-notes-8.5.3-to-notes-8.5.3-using-surunas-on-windows-7vista?opendocument&comments Tue, 4 Oct 2011 13:37:16 -0400 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/missing-.itw-file-from-lotus-notes-8.5.3-standard-install-kits-updated Jeff Mitchell http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/missing-.itw-file-from-lotus-notes-8.5.3-standard-install-kits-updated?opendocument&comments http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/missing-.itw-file-from-lotus-notes-8.5.3-standard-install-kits-updated

"The InstallShield Tuner for Lotus Notes configuration file (LotusNotes853.itw) was inadvertently excluded from the 8.5.3 Notes Standard Client, All Client (Notes, Admin, Designer) webkits and ISO images. The absence of this file will affect Administrators using the InstallShield Tuner for Lotus Notes to generate a transform file for customized installations on Windows.

Instructions:
- Download LotusNotes853.itw from the below file to the root of the Lotus Notes Client install kit.

Once extracted to the root of the install kit, customers can continue with normal Tuner operations."

LotusNotes853.itw

Some Frequently Asked Questions:

Who is impacted by this missing file?
The impact of this particular issue for customers is fairly minimal.  The missing file is not an end user file.  Only Administrators that generate transforms using the Tuner product are impacted.  If you are not an Administrator and do not use the Tuner then you don't need the file. There are several other programs that allow transforms to be generated that do not require the missing file and will work perfectly without it.  Once the file is downloaded and copied to the kit directory, no further work is required of the Administrator.  

Why don't you guys just repackage and re-release the install kits?
As usual, it's just not that simple.  Repackaging the kits would require that we rerun all the end game testing on the new kit.  It's not acceptable to IBM quality standards to simply release a kit, even if it's just "repackaged", without full testing.  

Why did this happen and how do you prevent it from happening again?
In this particular case, a test for this file's existence in the install kits prior to shipping wasn't run.  It will be automatically run on all kits prior to shipping from now on.
]]> http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dxcomments/missing-.itw-file-from-lotus-notes-8.5.3-standard-install-kits-updated http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/missing-.itw-file-from-lotus-notes-8.5.3-standard-install-kits-updated?opendocument&comments Thu, 7 Apr 2011 10:37:35 -0400 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/setup.exe-verbose-logs-and-you. Jeff Mitchell http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/setup.exe-verbose-logs-and-you.?opendocument&comments http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/setup.exe-verbose-logs-and-you.
Support:  Hello, this is Support.  How can I help you today?
Customer:  Um, Hi.  I'm having a problem installing Notes.  Can you help me out?
Support:  Sure. I'd be happy to.  What exactly is the problem you are seeing?
Customer: Well, the installer keeps displaying an error message and exiting without actually installing the program.  
Support:  Ah I see.  Can you describe the error messages that is being displayed?
Customer: Yes, it says "Error 1603:  Something bad happened".
Support:  Really?  "Something bad happened"?  That's a new one.  I'm going to need to see some logs to dive on this further.  You can find the logs in .
Customer: Okay, I'll send those along.  Is there anything else you'll need?
Support:  Nope, that should be it until we've seen those logs.
Customer: Okay, Thanks for your time.
Support: You're welcome and thank you for calling Support. Have a nice day.

Remember this is my imagination  so please no angry emails from my very good and capable friends in Support.  I also made up the "Something bad happened" error message, that's not really in the installer. (But that pretty much is an accurate description of the Error 1603).  Next this conversation occurs between a support engineer and a development engineer.

Support: Hey dev.  I've got a customer that's have an installation issue "1603 something bad happened".  Can you take a look?
Dev:  Sure.  I hate that error message.   You have some logs?
Support: Yup, in your in-box.
A couple of minutes pass.
Dev:  Okay, I see the error message but I'm not exactly sure what's leading up to the error.  Do you have verbose logs?
Support:  Nope, only the ones the customer sent me.
Dev: Hmm, we'll need to see those to determine exactly what's going on.  
Support: Okay, I'll ask for them.
Dev: Thanks.

and finally later.

Support: Hello, this is Support calling back about the issue you were seeing during installation.
Customer: Hello.   How'd it go with the logs?
Support: Well, the logs show the error but not the cause.  We are going to need to see some verbose logs to really diagnose the issue.
Customer.  Really?  Why don't you generate logs with all the information you need to diagnose issues in the first place?
Support: Well the logs can get really big and for most of the installations there really isn't any need for them to be generated. It's only when there's an unusual problem that we need them and by then it's too late to turn them on.
Customer: Okay, I'll generate them and send them along.
Support: Thank you.  Have a nice day.


That was probably a ridiculously long way to go about making the point of this post but I was feeling the creative writing mood today so you all had to suffer.  

We wanted to turn on verbose logging for our installer.  There is a way to do this via the registry http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223300 . The down side is that this solution turns logging for all Windows Installer based products and verbose log files can be quite large.  Some customers are still disk space constrained this wasn't a very good solution.  Also the verbose log files are created in the %TEMP% directory with a random name.  It would be hard for customers to find the correct log file to send in.  There is also the command line option to turn on verbose logging on a per installation basis which is what we've told customers to do but it was typically done after an installation issue had occurred which was too late in some cases.

In 8.5.2 we introduced a new installer launcher to address this problem. Previously we'd used the launcher from InstallShield that came with their install kit generating program. To prevent confusion and not break all the existing deployment infrastructure we named our launcher the same as it was before, "setup.exe".   This new setup.exe was created to specifically address the issue of installer verbose log file generation.  

The new setup.exe works by manipulating the command line passed to the msiexec call that actually does the product installation.  It parses the existing command line, if any, and adds the "/L*v LotusInstall.log"  string to it if it does not already exist in some manner.  This turns on verbose logging for the current installation and dumps it into a file.  It also stays around waiting for the installation to finish.  Once the install is done, it takes the new log file and creates an archive of it compressing the size down.  Because verbose log files are all text they compress very well.  This addressed the concern for those customers with smaller disk drives.   The archived log file is then moved to the installing user's My Documents directory as "LotusNotesInstallLog.cab" next to the long standing log file "LotusInstall.log" so it can be easily found.  

There were some issues with some of the code in 8.5.2 that prevented the log file from being archived in all situations.  These issues have been solved in 8.5.3.  From now on the conversation for installation issues should be a lot shorter and more productive.
















]]> http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dxcomments/setup.exe-verbose-logs-and-you. http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/setup.exe-verbose-logs-and-you.?opendocument&comments Wed, 2 Feb 2011 09:13:37 -0400 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/lotusphere-2011-presentation-slides-id202- ID202 Lotusphere 2011 Jeff Mitchell http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/lotusphere-2011-presentation-slides-id202-?opendocument&comments http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/lotusphere-2011-presentation-slides-id202-

ID202.odp ]]> http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dxcomments/lotusphere-2011-presentation-slides-id202- http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/lotusphere-2011-presentation-slides-id202-?opendocument&comments Thu, 2 Dec 2010 10:56:11 -0400 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/surunas-2.0 SURunAs Jeff Mitchell http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/surunas-2.0?opendocument&comments http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/surunas-2.0 As many of you are well aware, the SURunAs utility does not work on Windows Vista and Windows 7.    Well I'm happy to let you know that this will change in the 8.5.3 release of Notes.  Coding is still in progress so the updated feature will not be available in the code drop 2 release of Notes 8.5.3 that is coming soon.  However it should be in the next drop after that one.  

A high level synopsis of the new design:

The Lotus Notes installer will be modified to add a new Windows service during the installation.  This new "Smart Upgrade Service" will run in the local system account, which has local administrative privileges and will provide a mechanism for Smart Upgrade to perform upgrades of Notes for users that do not have the capability themselves.  Smart Upgrade will still use SURunAs to wrap the deployment package but will communicate with the SUService which will then validate the communicated information and perform the requested upgrade. Finally the SUService will communicate the results of the installation back to SURunAs which will then return the results back to SmartUpgrade. The communication between the client processes running in the user session and the service process running in the system sessions will be encrypted and validated to prevent unauthorized transactions.

And a picture of this new design:



]]> http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dxcomments/surunas-2.0 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/surunas-2.0?opendocument&comments Tue, 9 Nov 2010 08:15:48 -0400 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/a-new-surunas-feature-for-8.5.2 SURunAs Jeff Mitchell http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/a-new-surunas-feature-for-8.5.2?opendocument&comments http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/a-new-surunas-feature-for-8.5.2


If you click the highlighted check box, you get the following:



Pretty cool huh?  The username and password requirements are ignored. Now you have the ability to create deployment packages similar in functionality to the Notes webkits. namely self extracting executables that run a program after extraction.  We added this feature because a number of you requested the ability to customize our install kits and still use them in SmartUpgrade as attachments.  

So now you can extract an install kit from one of our webkits, customize it to your hearts content using a transform and then repackage into a single file executable for use with SmartUpgrade.  You simply include the transform in the list of files to repackage and then specify it on the command line used to launch the embedded executable (typically setup.exe). Like so:



This feature is completely version independent so you can grab the SUSetRunAsWizard.exe from an Notes 8.5.2 Designer (Allclient) installation and use it to repackage any Notes version you need to.    Happy repackaging!

]]> http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dxcomments/a-new-surunas-feature-for-8.5.2 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/a-new-surunas-feature-for-8.5.2?opendocument&comments Thu, 14 Oct 2010 14:18:51 -0400 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/nsd-k-vs.-nsd-kill- NSD Lotus Notes System Diagnostics command line kill Jeff Mitchell http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/nsd-k-vs.-nsd-kill-?opendocument&comments http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/nsd-k-vs.-nsd-kill- read this,
Once upon a time, NSD had a command line option -kill.  This is the description of that option from NSD's help.

Runs NSD in a special mode that kills all Notes/Domino processes in the current "partition" (i.e. all processes that are accessing Notes shared memory and that are running from the same location as NSD

Sounds pretty ominous huh?  We'll it was.  It is also slow and dived deep into the OS to do the dirty work of getting Notes killed.  At some point in NSD's evolution, a lighter implementation of -kill was created.  This new approach leveraged the NotesInit and NotesTerm API functionality that all processes that worked with Notes invoked.  The NSD -kill option was changed to kill processes listed in the pid.nbf.  "Wait what is the pid.nbf you ask?" "Go read this", I reply.  However the  old sledgehammer functionality was kept around and hidden under the command line option -k.  

"That's nice, but so what?" you may be asking yourself. That's a pretty good question.  For 99% of the time (a percentage I made up btw) -kill should be perfectly sufficient for  killing Notes processes.  However ever so often a rogue application somehow manages to get into a state that either doesn't update the pid.nbf properly or fails to be terminated even thought it's listed .  In those cases NSD -k is a possible solution.  

Happy Mitch? ]]> http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dxcomments/nsd-k-vs.-nsd-kill- http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/nsd-k-vs.-nsd-kill-?opendocument&comments Tue, 3 Aug 2010 15:34:50 -0400 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/you-can-blame-me.- SURunAs Windows 7 Windows Vista Jeff Mitchell http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/you-can-blame-me.-?opendocument&comments http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/you-can-blame-me.- http://www.thenewdominoadmin.com/blog/?p=1251

SURunAs leverages a Windows API function called CreateProcessWithLogonW (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms682431(VS.85).aspx).   A Google search for "CreateProcessWithLogon" and Vista will show that the behavior of this function changed significantly between XP and Vista (UAC, bleh).   If you get deep into the technical details of the requirements forced on programs by UAC you will see that programs have to jump through some serious hoops to get a process to run as a different user with elevated privileges, which is exactly what SURunAs does.  
We have a solution to the problem.  We probably should have prioritized our items differently and gotten it into the Notes 8.5.  However at the time Windows Vista adoption was so low that we judged some of the other items to be of more importance to users and so this item got dropped from 8.5.  Unfortunately it's a fairly significant redesign of not only SURunAs itself but will require some changes to the Notes client and the Notes client installer.  The rather large scope of the work has prevented us from putting it into the product in 8.5.1 and now 8.5.2.  We generally try not to make huge changes in the maintenance releases for all the obvious reasons and making this feature work on Windows 7 definitely qualifies as "huge".  
The TL;DR version is we know about the problem, we know how to solve the problem and are working on a solution.  I'm going to be a scrooge and tell you that it's not fixed in 8.5.2.  Sorry to ruin your Christmas.   It's definitely on the Notes 9.0 list of things to do and if there is any way possible for us to bring it in any earlier I promise try my hardest to do so even it if ends up requiring me to chain myself to my desk. ]]> http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dxcomments/you-can-blame-me.- http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/you-can-blame-me.-?opendocument&comments Thu, 17 Jun 2010 10:12:27 -0400 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/chained-installs Lotus Notes Install Fixpack Chained Jeff Mitchell http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/chained-installs?opendocument&comments http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/chained-installs SMS to push down the install kits to each user's machine overnight but didn't have a good solution on how to actually get the installation to kick off for each user.  After evaluating different options, we recommended they use the built in feature of Notes called SmartUpgrade to do this portion of the deployment.  Since they wanted to put Notes 8.5.1 and FP1 down at the same time in addition to doing some cleanup on the machines, we started by writing a batch file that would be kicked off by SmartUpgrade to do the chained installation.  We quickly realized that Windows batch files weren't quite powerful enough to do all the things the customer wanted to do during the upgrade so we switched to using Windows Script Host.  WSH allowed us to do everything the customer wanted in a very timely fashion.  

Once the engagement was done and the customer was happily running Notes 8.5.1 FP1 I rewrote the script we'd created to be more generic so it could be used by others as a way of chaining multiple Notes install kits together.   It includes some extra clean up of running processes we've occasionally seen customers running into and also includes extensive logging.

I'm not going to do a detailed line by line analysis of the script because I think it's pretty well commented already but if you have any specific questions please don't hesitate to ask.
]]> http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dxcomments/chained-installs http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/chained-installs?opendocument&comments Tue, 6 Apr 2010 11:51:05 -0400 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/dynamic-multiuser-customized-data-directory Lotus Notes Multiuser Install Customzied Data Directory Jeff Mitchell http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/dynamic-multiuser-customized-data-directory?opendocument&comments http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/dynamic-multiuser-customized-data-directory
MULTIUSERBASDIR=%CUSTOMDATADIR%

where CUSTOMDATADIR was defined per user to be either a local path or a mapped drive.  There is no way to do this in the current implementation because we only resolve the environment path once during the client startup.  The path is either local or remote for all users.  However, with a little wsh scripting I was able to code up a way to have the CUSTOMDATADIR value be either local or on a mapped drive depending on the user.  This script would need to run once on each machine for each user.  The easiest way to do this would be a Windows login script (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc758629(WS.10).aspx ).  Several other ways also exist if login scripts are not possible in your environment.

winlogon.vbs

During the installation of Notes, a workspace directory is created and used as a housekeeping location for provisioning operations. Because some of the provisioning operations run in the system context and not the user context, setting the CUSTOMDATADIR in a batch file before running the Notes installer is not sufficient.  The value must be resolvable to the system context at install time and therefore must be set in system environment variable context.  Here is a script that sets the CUSTOMDATADIR appropriately.  This should be run prior to starting the Notes installation and can be called in your batch file (or the batch file could be subsumed into this script, your call).   Once the installation is finished but before Notes is run for the first time, the CUSTOMDATADIR value can be changed to some other location.  This will cause the Notes client to create the new location if it doesn't already exist and populate it as a Notes data directory (with workspace) at client startup .

setvar.vbs

A proposed sequence of events:

Global changes:
  1. Create a batch file for installing Notes to call the above script.    This will create point to a workspace that is only used during the installation process in the current user's %USERPROFILE% directory.
  2. Set the Windows logon script to run when each user logs in.  This script may require some tweaking to make it work in the your environment, I just guessed at a valid test for which users have remote data.

Per Machine:
  1. Run a batch file via SmartUpgrade (or 3rd party deployment tool) to install Notes
  2.. If the installing user is a valid user, run the script below to set the CUSTOMDATADIR env value appropriately.  If installation is done via an admin account etc, then this step can be skipped.
  3. When the user logs in, the logon script sets the CUSTOMDATADIR properly and the user can start Notes. ]]> http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dxcomments/dynamic-multiuser-customized-data-directory http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/dynamic-multiuser-customized-data-directory?opendocument&comments Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:26:04 -0400 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/reference-article-understanding-the-ibm-lotus-notes-8.5.x-client-directory-structure install Pam Gilday http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/reference-article-understanding-the-ibm-lotus-notes-8.5.x-client-directory-structure?opendocument&comments http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/reference-article-understanding-the-ibm-lotus-notes-8.5.x-client-directory-structure Understanding the IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.x client directory structure" by Hong Tao Wei is very informative. ]]> http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dxcomments/reference-article-understanding-the-ibm-lotus-notes-8.5.x-client-directory-structure http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/reference-article-understanding-the-ibm-lotus-notes-8.5.x-client-directory-structure?opendocument&comments Mon, 4 Jan 2010 17:33:55 -0400 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/sneak-peeks Jeff Mitchell http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/sneak-peeks?opendocument&comments http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/sneak-peeks 2
ID102.odp ]]> http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dxcomments/sneak-peeks http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/sneak-peeks?opendocument&comments Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:08:04 -0400 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/you-ask-i-answer.- Lotus Notes Install REDIR_DATADIR REDIR_VDIR_SHARED properties Jeff Mitchell http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/you-ask-i-answer.-?opendocument&comments http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/you-ask-i-answer.- Christian Henesler recently asked in a comment on this blog "Can you please tell us something about REDIR_DATADIR and REDIR_VDIR_SHARED and what these parameters are used for and what the difference is to DATADIR and VDIR_SHARED?".   (Actually, it was the only comment on this blog.  But that stats db shows there are couple readers out there.  (Hi Andrew's mom!))

Christian is asking about a couple of MSI properties in the Lotus Notes client installer.  Our installer uses the Windows Installer Service to do the heavy lifting of installation work.  We provide the WIS with information as tables in an .msi file and WIS does the rest.  Well, most of the rest of installing the Notes core binaries anyway.  There is this other technology we use from Expeditor called provisioning that does some pretty heavy lifting as well, but that is another topic for another day.  

WARNING: The rest of this article will be heavily referencing Windows Installer terms and concepts.  If you are not familiar with it, I suggest you go spend some time reading this, buy some Red Bull before you start.  

The Notes installers uses two properties DATADIR and VDIR_SHARED as the locations used to install several components.  You can see this in the Component table where VDIR_SHARED is listed as the entry in the Directory_ column.  If you then examine the Directory table, you will see the the VDIR_SHARED's parent is DATADIR.  This indirection allows us to set the value of VDIR_SHARED for multi-user installs so that the data files are installed to the All Users location.  We do this by dynamically setting the value of the DATADIR property at install time.  However, by default, Windows permissions prevent Notes from running correctly if the data directory is read only for the user that runs Notes. So we needed a way to change the security settings on the data directory for both single user installs and multi-user installs.  MSI provides a crude mechanism in the LockPermissions table.  We initially added VDIR_SHARED and DATADIR to the LockPermissions table and saw that the permissions on these directories were created as we expected during installing Notes.  However, further testing revealed that we had broken an install mode of Notes that has been available since the early days even though it's not been officially supported, network shared installs.  The LockPermissions table mechanism is unable to set the security permissions on a network drive so when installing Notes such that the data directory lived on a mapped drive, an error would occur during the installation when the LockPermission actions were attempted.  

We were unable to set any conditions on the LockPermissions table entries and we had problems with trying to clear out the LockPermissions entries that caused problems at runtime.  We simply added two new properties, REDIR_DATADIR and REDIR_VDIR_SHARED, that we could dynamically change to temporary values right before the LockPermissions actions occurred, if installing to a network drive for data files was detected.  This solved the problem we'd introduced without having to write out own security setting Custom Actions  and without impacting any other part of the installer.



]]> http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dxcomments/you-ask-i-answer.- http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/you-ask-i-answer.-?opendocument&comments Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:18:14 -0400 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/whats-all-this-stuff-in-the-lotus-notes-install-kits Lotus Notes transforms language files setup .mst .itw .ini Jeff Mitchell http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/whats-all-this-stuff-in-the-lotus-notes-install-kits?opendocument&comments http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/whats-all-this-stuff-in-the-lotus-notes-install-kits
Prior to Notes 8.0, the full install kit looked something like this (with minor changes to the version string for the .msi file).

0x0409.ini	The English strings used by setup.exe to display messages to the user.
Data1.cab	The compressed archive of all the files that make up Lotus Notes.
instmsia.exe	The Windows Installer Service 2.0 installer provided by Microsoft (used for upgrading really old versions of Windows)
instmsiw.exe	The Windows Installer Service 2.0 installer provided by Microsoft (used for upgrading really old versions of Windows)
Lotus Notes 7.0.msi	The MSI file that contains tables used the Windows Installer Service to install and configure Lotus Notes
LotusNotes.itw	The license file used by the InstallShield Tuner for Lotus Notes to generate transform files.
setup.exe	Launcher program that can be used to install Lotus Notes with a simplified command line.
Setup.ini	File used by setup.exe for some configuration.

With the release of Lotus Notes 8.0, IBM added the requirement that a license displayed during the installation be displayed in 13 languages even in the English install.  This required us to translate the panels displayed during the install and add those strings to the MSI tables.  In Notes we did this by adding transform files, one for each language, to the install kits.  Each transform file contains just the translated strings for a language.  At install time, setup.exe determines the user's Windows locale setting and if it corresponds to one of the available transforms, launches the Notes installer and instructs the Windows Installer service to apply the transform.  This changes the installer's display panels to the required language. If the user's locale is not supported, then the user simply sees the English installer as before.   This adding of the 13 languages added a bunch of files to the 8.0 client install kit.
In Notes 8.0, the Basic kit looked like below with a lot of new files.  

0x0404.ini	New - Chinese (Taiwan) strings used by setup.exe to display messages to user.
0x0405.ini	New - Czech strings used by setup.exe to display messages to the user.
0x0407.ini	New - German (Germany) strings used by setup.exe to display messages to the user.
0x0409.ini	English strings used by setup.exe to display messages to the user.
0x040a.ini	New - Spanish (Traditional Sort) strings used by setup.exe to display messages to the user.
0x040c.ini	New - French (France) strings used by setup.exe to display messages to the user.
0x0410.ini	New - Italian (Italy) strings used by setup.exe to display messages to the user.
0x0411.ini	New - Japanese strings used by setup.exe to display messages to the user.
0x0412.ini	New - Korean strings used by setup.exe to display messages to the user.
0x0415.ini	New - Polish strings used by setup.exe to display messages to the user.
0x0416.ini	New - Portuguese (Brazil) strings used by setup.exe to display messages to the user.
0x041f.ini	New - Turkish strings used by setup.exe to display messages to the user.
0x0804.ini	New - Chinese (PRC) strings used by setup.exe to display messages to the user.
1028.mst	New - Transform file that contains Chinese (Taiwan) strings used in installer panels and messages.
1029.mst	New - Transform file that contains Czech strings used in installer panels and messages.
1031.mst	New - Transform file that containsGerman (Germany) strings used in installer panels and messages.
1033.mst	New - Transform file that contains English strings used in installer panels and messages.
1034.mst	New - Transform file that contains Spanish (Traditional Sort) strings used in installer panels and messages.
1036.mst	New - Transform file that contains French (France) strings used in installer panels and messages.
1040.mst	New - Transform file that contains Italian (Italy) strings used in installer panels and messages.
1041.mst	New - Transform file that contains Japanese strings used in installer panels and messages.
1042.mst	New - Transform file that contains Korean strings used in installer panels and messages.
1045.mst	New - Transform file that contains Polish strings used in installer panels and messages.
1046.mst	New - Transform file that contains Portuguese (Brazil) strings used in installer panels and messages.
1055.mst	New - Transform file that contains Turkish strings used in installer panels and messages.
2052.mst	New - Transform file that contains Chinese (PRC) strings used in installer panels and messages.
Data1.cab	The compressed archive of all the files that make up Lotus Notes.
instmsia.exe	The Windows Installer Service 2.0 installer provided by Microsoft (used for upgrading really old versions of Windows)
instmsiw.exe	The Windows Installer Service 2.0 installer provided by Microsoft (used for upgrading really old versions of Windows)
Lotus Notes 8.0.msi	The MSI file that contains tables used the Windows Installer Service to install and configure Lotus Notes
Lotus Notes 8.0.pdf	New - Package Definition File used to facilitate SMS deployments. (More information can be found http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb632631.aspx)
LotusNotes.itw	The license files used by the InstallShield Tuner for Lotus Notes to generate transform files.
setup.exe	Launcher program that can be used to install Lotus Notes with a simplified command line.
Setup.ini	File used by setup.exe for some configuration.

So in 8.0, when a user installs Notes on an Windows machine using one of the languages specified above, they will see not only the license files in the correct language but also the installer UI in the correct language.  This is a huge improvement over the past version for our non-English speaking customers that want to install the English client.

Pro Tip: You can force a particular language to be used by specifying it on the command line using the /L parameter.
For example to run the Notes installer using the Spanish UI, you would run setup /L1034 or you could run msiexec /i "Lotus Notes 8.0.msi" TRANSFORM=1034.msi





]]> http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dxcomments/whats-all-this-stuff-in-the-lotus-notes-install-kits http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/whats-all-this-stuff-in-the-lotus-notes-install-kits?opendocument&comments Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:02:09 -0400 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/upgrading-to-notes-8.5-replay-and-questionsanswers-from-open-mic-call upgrade Pam Gilday http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/upgrading-to-notes-8.5-replay-and-questionsanswers-from-open-mic-call?opendocument&comments http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/upgrading-to-notes-8.5-replay-and-questionsanswers-from-open-mic-call here looks really interesting! ]]> http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dxcomments/upgrading-to-notes-8.5-replay-and-questionsanswers-from-open-mic-call http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/upgrading-to-notes-8.5-replay-and-questionsanswers-from-open-mic-call?opendocument&comments Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:50:29 -0400 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/great-wiki-post-on-upgrading-a-notes-user-to-linux best practices Pam Gilday http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/great-wiki-post-on-upgrading-a-notes-user-to-linux?opendocument&comments http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/great-wiki-post-on-upgrading-a-notes-user-to-linux Migration and upgrade of IBM® Lotus® Notes® clients from either Microsoft® Windows® or Linux® to Lotus Notes 8.5 for Linux" authored by three senior folks in Böblingen, Germany. ]]> http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dxcomments/great-wiki-post-on-upgrading-a-notes-user-to-linux http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/great-wiki-post-on-upgrading-a-notes-user-to-linux?opendocument&comments Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:04:40 -0400 http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/subscribing-to-sites-and-blogs-using-notes-feeds feeds Pam Gilday http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/subscribing-to-sites-and-blogs-using-notes-feeds?opendocument&comments http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/subscribing-to-sites-and-blogs-using-notes-feeds this feed value.

I also subscribe to the Notes from Lotus Support feed and while I do not always remember to scan my feeds, I always learn something when I do. For example, this viewing netted these pointers:
How to obtain Notes 8.5FP1
Understanding Domino server clustering

You can also subscribe to a Notes and Domino wiki feed to pick up new, revised, and comment posts.
]]> http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dxcomments/subscribing-to-sites-and-blogs-using-notes-feeds http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/installblog.nsf/dx/subscribing-to-sites-and-blogs-using-notes-feeds?opendocument&comments