A Portal to a Portal

In order to further diagnose a problem, I needed to upgrade my Lotus Notes mail file to the most recent ODS ( On-Disk Structure ), which is now 51 with the latest Notes/Domino 8.5 products.

Given that I'm using an Ubuntu Linux desktop ( alongside my Macbook Pro ), I needed to be able to run the necessary compact command from a command line ( shell ).

Before I started, I shut down Notes to avoid any conflicts.

Given that I wanted to update to ODS 51, I added the line: -

Create_R85_Databases=1

to my notes.ini file ( /home/hayd/lotus/notes/data/notes.ini ).

Then. following this post, I opened a command prompt ( using the xterm command to open a bash shell ), and changed to the Lotus Notes program directory ( /opt/ibm/lotus/notes ).

From there, I ran the command ./compact -C /home/hayd/lotus/notes/data/mail09/DAVEHAY.NSF. Sadly, this failed with the message: -

11/02/2009 14:26:10 Database compactor error: Wrong Password. (Passwords are case sensitive - be sure to use correct upper and lower case.)

This indicated that I needed to have previously entered the Notes password before I tried to access the mail file, which seems like a pretty good idea.

Therefore, I restarted Notes and entered my password - this automatically opened a tab to my mail file, which I ignored - Doh !

I repeated the command again, which again failed with the message: -

11/02/2009 14:37:48 Informational, database design compression is enabled in database /lotus/notes/data/mail09/DAVEHAY.NSF.
11/02/2009 14:37:48 Informational, LZ1 is enabled in database /lotus/notes/data/mail09/DAVEHAY.NSF.
11/02/2009 14:37:48 Compacting /lotus/notes/data/mail09/DAVEHAY.NSF (Dave Hay)
11/02/2009 14:37:48 Error compacting /lotus/notes/data/mail09/DAVEHAY.NSF: Database is currently in use by you or another user
11/02/2009 14:37:48 Database compactor process shutdown

The third time around, I closed down all the tabs in the Notes client, and tried again; this time, it succeeded with: -

11/02/2009 14:41:16 Informational, database design compression is enabled in database /lotus/notes/data/mail09/.NSF.
11/02/2009 14:41:16 Informational, LZ1 is enabled in database /lotus/notes/data/mail09/.NSF.
11/02/2009 14:41:16 Compacting /lotus/notes/data/mail09/.NSF (Dave Hay)
11/02/2009 14:41:26 Compacted /lotus/notes/data/mail09/.NSF, 0K bytes recovered (0%)
11/02/2009 14:41:28 Database compactor process shutdown

It's worth noting that the -C switch on the compact command means "Copy-style compaction"

If it helps, the ODS version of a database can be seen on the DB properties ( File -> Application -> Properties ) as per the screenshot.