Bill Buchan and Paul Mooney delivered a presentation that described several situations where a Notes developer or an administrator caused problems in their environment by not knowing (or realizing) what they were doing. The case studies they presented included

1. Saving Disk Space
2. ECL Hell
3. Magical Mail File
4. Now You See It
5. Son of eMail from Hell
6. The "DeCrappy Code"
7. Identity Crisis
8. Missing You Already
9. Security for Beginners
10. Agent Ageism
11. Oh, is that important
12. The Leak

From these case studies, I learned that

1. The Domino server will continue to run even after you manually delete the Domino executibles from the server. A better way to get space in a hurry is to use Directory Links.
2. The Domino ECL is very powerful, and changes to it should be tested before they are pushed out to the entire organization via Policies.
3. Exclude your Domino data directories, temporary directories, etc. from your server's anti-virus software. Use anti-virus software specifically for Domino on your servers.
4. You can use the Full Access Administrator to view and fix documents where the Readers fields have been corrupted.
5. E-mails with large attachments (ex: 500 meg) will cause the mail router to grind to a halt.
6. Be aware of how much HTML you send to browser clients. A 20 minute page load time is never acceptable.
7. Never create a person "server" account to try to gain access to a restricted application. Deleting the person "server" account via AdminP can have dramatic consequences.
8. Be careful when changing the Leaving on date for the Out Of Office agent. If you set it several years back, it will send out messages to all users you received messages from since that time.
9. Never change the Allow anonymous Notes connections server doc setting to Yes. This is a huge security hole.
10. Always verify that your backups are working properly before making a major change to an application.
11. Deleting the LocalDomainServers group via AdminP is very, very bad! Disabling replication of the NAB alone will not stop the AdminP request from replicating to other servers and changing the NAB on those servers.
12. Be very careful with Domino applications that store personal data. Web search engines will find your application and the documents in it and will include them in search results.

Paul stressed several times that you should spend time collecting information before changing anything on the server. Check the Notes Log, the server console and other common repositories for server statistics before changing anything.

Bill also warned us against turning into Captain Click when troubleshooting a problem. Clicking through screens is not as useful as stepping away from a problem and thinking about what is going on.

As many others have stated, this is a great presentation and should be required viewing for anyone who thinks they are a legitimate Notes/Domino developer or administrator.

Oh, there is a Worst Practices website that you can submit your own experiences too. I plan on submitting something when I get back to the office, to see if Bill or Paul know of a way that I can prevent it.

Lotusphere2007

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