I’ve been quiet the last few days, I know. My time has been unevenly split between work and family (and guess which part got more of my time…) I’ve had the most unnerving experience yesterday when I moved my Domino application from my development server to the production cluster (two domino servers).

My tests all ran. Everything looked the way it should. I was happy. Getting up at 3:30 in the morning was worth it – or so I thought…

Then my customer called. Angry. The layout of the menus was all wrong, and if that minor thing was wrong she said, god knows what else would be wrong too. I looked at my browser – all OK. I had her on the phone – and her version was all screwed up. Great. Fucking great.

I remembered that the production version was running on a cluster. I tried to find differences between the two databases on the two servers. None. Well – one – a document thought missing had turned up on my customers version – not on mine. Stranger and stranger.

Fired of an email to the Notes admin late at night. Agreed to come in at 8 to try and fix the problem.

When I got there I met one angry notes admin. The databases were perfectly in sync – and clearly my problems were not her problems… Ahh

I plugged in and after a nights sleep found the problem with the menus: two views with identical names. The sort order was different on each database. Pure chance, which server would serve the requests. Deleting the views. Replacing the design. All done – fixed.

Domino is great – but sometimes the problems with it can be – shall we say – taxing?

Back to work at my other client. There my login no longer works. Somebody forgot to tell the ID-office about my contract which had been extended. Waiting. Time to write in the blog.