Domino 8 Issues and weirdness
Okay, here’s an interesting one for you. I moved our companies servers to Domino 8 a couple of months ago. Everything was running fine… until I put some people on the Notes 8 mail template. In the last month I’ve had 15 PANIC: null handle crashes of the nHTTP stack alone. Every one of them was caused by a user accessing their email from a web browser. Notes 8 Mail file, Domino 8 server. If finally got to be too much when we had 7 crashes in the last 24 hours.
So, I’ve escalated through IBM Lotus support (and the top tier guys are really amazingly good) and our solution for now is to put those users back on the DWA7.ntf template. Simple enough right? Well not so fast…
You see, when you upgrade a Domino server from 7 to 8, the process actually REMOVES the old DWA7.ntf template and does not replace it. Now in my decade+ of upgrading Domino servers, I never remember the upgrade process EVER deleting old mail templates. Anyway, I happened to find an old copy of DWA7.ntf and I put it on my server, and reverted those mail files back to DWA7 from Mail8.
The thing that has me nervous is, WHY does the upgrade remove DWA7? Is there a particular reason I shouldn’t use it? Now both techs I talked with at IBM said that using it should be no issue at all, but neither one of them had an answer as to why it left in the first place. So anyone out there have an answer for that, should I NOT be running DWA7? And is anyone else seeing similar crashes? Let me know…
October 24, 2007 @ 5:29 am
I’ve been running Domino 8 since around august 25, and haven’t had a single problem with it. Granted, out of about 35 users, I’m the only one running Notes 8 and the Notes 8 mail template, but I do use DWA almost daily.
October 24, 2007 @ 8:43 am
I’ve seen similar crashes with DWA with almost every Domino server upgrade at my former employer going back to around 6.5.4. It’s been well-documented on my blog. I’ve seen the 12 crashes in a single day and top tier support is really helpful too. But I’m not sure why it seems that DWA has so many issues…
I did move a small shop to Domino 8 last night and verified that DWA7.ntf was indeed removed. There should be no problems running that template, though.
October 24, 2007 @ 10:09 am
Any NSD ?
I have seen that by turning GZIP compression of will fix some issues with DWA.
November 6, 2007 @ 7:46 am
Any updated from IBM on this? We had a server crash twice yesterday with the “PANIC: LookupHandle: null handle” as well. It happened with some mail8 dwa users active.
November 6, 2007 @ 11:05 am
Nope. They didn’t really have an answer. We just downgraded all of the Mail 8 template users to DWA7 and haven’t had a crash since.
If you are having the same issue, please report it. The more people reporting the same thing the better…
-Grey
February 14, 2008 @ 1:55 pm
We have exactly the same error! We upgraded from Domino 7 to 8 last week. We also use dwa8 as our template. Since this week we have the same PANIC error messages and Domino restarts.
I hope this is fixed by IBM shortly.
-Ferry