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…