Using a proxy server with Lotus Notes: NTLM authentication and exclusion lists

If you ever wondered why it's sometimes such a hassle to copy & paste data from a webbrowser directly into your Lotus Notes Client, it might be due to a missing proxy configuration.
If your company's proxy server requires NTLM-Authentication, you'll notice that entering your domain-credentials in the proxy configuration dialog of your location document will not work as expected. The client will keep prompting for the proper credentials since it will always try basic authentication with the proxy server. That's because Lotus Notes doesn't support NTLM-authentication out of the box. In order to make this work, you need to set the (undocumented) parameter W3ContextNTLMMode=1 in notes.ini. Now you don't even need to enter any credentials in order to use the proxy, since the Lotus Notes Client (on a Windows OS) will use your operating system login to authenticate with the proxy server.
Now that you're able to use your companies proxy server with your Lotus Notes Client, you'll quite probably want to make some exclusions for hosts that aren't accessible through the proxy server (hosts on your internal network)
When you try to do this through a policy, you need to enter multiple values separated with semicolons. If you separate them with CRLFs, only the first entry of the list will be honored. Unfortunately, this isn't documented anywhere, so i had to figure this out using trial & error.

Link Collection: Deploying Eclipse Plugins in Lotus Notes

A very good guide to start with:

http://www.slideshare.net/muenzpraeger/2010-deploying-plugins-to-the-enterprise

Just in case something goes wrong:

http://lekkimworld.com/2010/03/17/complete_guide_to_manually_uninstalling_plugins_from_lotus_notes.html

And there seems to be a lot that might go wrong:

http://lekkimworld.com/mView.action?entry=1343722934466

http://swdevadventures.blogspot.de/2011/09/signing-eclipse-plugin-with-java-7.html

http://www.nsftools.com/blog/blog-08-2011.htm#08-10-11

Installing Sametime 8.5.2 (+IFR1) on SLES 11 SP2

Installing Sametime 8.5.2 (+IFR1) on SLES 11 SP2

When you try to install sametime 8.5.2 IFR1 ond SuSe Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2 you'll quite probably encounter a problem with a missing RPM:

libstdc++-43-32bit

The release notes that ship with SLES 11 SP2 say that it was replaced by libstdc++46-32bit.

Since the current libstdc++46 conflicts with libstc++43, you really shouldn't try to downgrade the libraries or install them ignoring those dependencies - it will result in a broken YAST or even a completely unusable system, which i had to learn the hard way ;-)

The easy solution to the problem is to fire up vi, and edit setuplinux.bin - which is just a shell-script.

Find the following line:

ST_SLES11_REQ_RPM_LIST_x86_64="libstdc++33-32bit xorg-x11-libXmu-32bit-7 xorg-x11-libXp-32bit-7 libstdc++43-32bit"

..and replace the version number for libstdc++:

ST_SLES11_REQ_RPM_LIST_x86_64="libstdc++33-32bit xorg-x11-libXmu-32bit-7 xorg-x11-libXp-32bit-7 libstdc++46-32bit"

As far as i can tell, this doesn't seem to have any negative impact on the sametime installation, but as always: use at your own risk!

Lotus Notes & the "integrated" browser

Did you ever wonder why the "integrated browser" of the Lotus Notes client behaves so differently compared to your regular browser? Here's one reason for that:

Using the "integrated browser"-option (on a Windows-OS) means that Lotus Notes utilizes the already installed Internet Explorer engine of your operating system to download and render web-pages (and also images in emails that need to be downloaded before you're able to see them). I would usually expect that engine to behave more or less the same way as the corresponding "standalone-browser", but that would be way too easy, right...?! ;-)
As soon as you have a situation where the user-agent-string of your browser matters, you're probably going to run into the same trouble which i encountered. You'll see that although you've already installed Internet Explorer 8 or even 9, the user-agent-string that the "integrated browser" transfers to the webserver, doesn't seem to fit into that picture. That's because the integrated browser is using the IE WebBrowserControl, which defaults to use an IE7-compatibility-mode that was introduced with IE8!
If you want to change that behaviour, you'll have to modify the registry like that:


[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION]
"nlnotes.exe"=dword:000022b8
"notes.exe"=dword:000022b8
"notes2.exe"=dword:000022b8
"ntaskldr.exe"=dword:000022b8
"IEOOP.exe"=dword:000022b8


I'm not sure if all of these entries are needed, but at least for the IEOOP.exe, i can confirm that this is used as soon as you open a webpage from within the Lotus Notes client.
(Some of) The remaining entries are needed if you don't want the engine to use the compatibility-mode for received mails where embedded images are downloaded from external resources (e.g. when you click "Show Images").


Further information:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6717055/how-do-i-turn-off-compatibility-view-on-the-ie-webbrowsercontrol-in-a-winforms-a

GetFileAttr not working for large files?!

Coding a little script to accomplish some administrative tasks, I seem to have stumbled across some odd behaviour when dealing with large files and GetFileAttr in Lotus Script. It seems that GetFileAttr is not able to handle files where the physical size is above a certain limit. I've tested with some files trying to figure out the limit, and i believe that it's probably 2GB on our system running Lotus Domino 8.5.3FP1 on SLES11SP2. When I try to read the attributes of a file with a size above the limit, the script stops with a "File not found"-error. Has anyone else seen this?

New Traveler Fix Pack 8.5.3.2

There's a new Fix Pack for Lotus Notes Traveler available from IBM:

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/dx/Lotus_Notes_Traveler_APAR_listing#8532

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/dx/Lotus_Notes_Traveler_8.5.3.2

The package is available via Fix Central.

8.5.3 Domino Server installs client templates

With release 8.5.3 of Lotus Domino, setup installs some templates to the server which you had to put there manually in the past, in case you wanted to register roaming users via Lotus script (read more on that here).
The following templates are installed:

bookmark.ntf (v8.5.3 - 16.09.2010)
feedcontent.ntf (v8.5.2 - 01.04.2010)
notebook8.ntf (v8.5.1 - 24.09.2009)
pernames.ntf (v8.5.3 - 18.05.2011)
roamingdata.ntf (v8.5.1 - 21.07.2009)