How do you recover from a Notes Client crash without rebooting?

[themanfalconar]

Hi there,

Our organisation is having major trouble with Lotus Notes; specifically the 5.0.12 client. The problem is that the notes client tends to crash periodically, and I'm yet to find a reason why. The notes crashes would not be such an issue if it meant that users did not have to log out and in again in order to sort out the Notes problem.

The two error messages that frequently appear are: "An unexpected network error ocurred." and "Internal error."

I know that there are some tools out there that allow you to recover from a notes crash without a reboot, but what I am trying to find out is exactly what these tools do - do they just kill processes? If so, what are they? I'd really like to put my own tool together to solve this problem, so if anyone out there knows what to do I'll be eternally grateful!!!

Regards,

Dan Falconar

 

[Baggers2003]

Hi,

Not sure if it's the same with the crashes you're getting, and so you may like to test this on a non-critical machine first, but if you get rid of the processes nhldaemon or naldaemon (can't remember which one is left after a crash), wait a bit and then relaunch Notes it should work OK. If not get rid of anything Notsie, like nlnotes.exe if it's still there. To be honest I used to get rid of all processes starting with "n" before I narrowed it down, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend this!

Cheers,
Steve

 

[ABOzIT]

We use ZapNotes. It's fantastic.

When Notes crashes just run ZapNotes and it kills all the processes that are still running that causes Notes not to restart without shutting down. Get it here:

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/sandbox.nsf/0/8aa14311cb0c51c388256aa400804e4e

Hope this helps

 

[ije]

zapnotes or notesmedic are 2 utils designed to help you here.

ije.

 

[bingvillamor]

Hi,
End the process of notes.exe or nlnotes.exe and nhldaemn.dll and you can launch again the client.

Regards,

Bing

 

[mizzy]

Hi there,

Use zapnotes its super.

However I guess that you'd like to stop the clients crashing in the first place.

Well recently I had a similiar problem. Notes crashing, Nlnotes.exe errors. I did everything to try and stop the problem(you may have comes across the post).

I did everything except one thing. Our servers were running r4.6.6b(still are getting rid of in two weeks). My clients were running 5.0.8. Lotus advise not to have the client running a newer version than the server(but did not mention anything about client crashes).

Anyways, I uninstalled the 5.0.8 client and installed 4.6.6b. Touch wood but it seems to have solved the problem. The clients have stopped crashing.

Regards,

 

[themanfalconar]

Thank you all for your comments and suggestions. I do use ZapNotes and KillNotes (both of which are available from IBM's site). Most of the time, ZapNotes does the job. Occasionally, however, it doen't work, so I use KillNotes. KillNotes is much dirtier, i.e. it doesn't give you a nice GUI or restart notes for you, but it nukes all processes related to Notes. I have been rolling out ZapNotes to the users as it's much friendlier.

Mizzy - unfortunately I do not have the ability to do anything with the notes server (because if I did, I'd throw it in the bin), but I'll see what I can do with the client side of things.

Ultimately I want to find out just why Notes is crashing like this, rather than the standard answer I get; "Notes is s***, use x/y/z".

Thanks all for your suggestions, anyway.

Dan Falconar

 

[stafftech]

I typically use us e the alt cntrl del key and end every task that begins with an n. Seems to work 99% of the time.