To Make A Server Crash, You Must Find The Right Tool For The Job
   

This is going to be a short post. I have been dealing with a few server crashes recently. Some of them having to do with Tivoli and others … well, the PMRs are still opened. However, I got sick and tired of always manually collecting the IBM_TECHNICAL_SUPPORT folder, the log.nsf, the notes.ini, the Event Viewer Files and the WinMSD NFO file each time I was opening a PMR for a crashed server.
   

So, I wrote myself a nice little batch file that does all that for me. Once I had the batch file done, I decided to try it out in the “Run this Script After Server Fault” field of one of the servers in the test environment. But, to test it out, I needed to “create” a server fault.
  

And here’s the gist of this post: for those that don’t know it, there is a small utility on the Lotus Developer Domain Sandbox on a page titled “Utilities to crash client and server”. You can download it from here. The page might say that the platform is “AIX 64 bits” but the zip file contains every possible flavor of OS you can imagine. The version for Windows servers is at the root of the unzipped directory structure.
  

And what happens when you run it? Well, you get a nice “PANIC” error … your server crashes and NSD fires off. Simple is beautiful (in most cases).
   

So, for a guy like me testing out and debugging his “post-server-crash” script, this is very usefull … and by posting it on this blog, maybe someone else will discover it too (hopefully not to wreak havoc in his own environment).
   

Side Notes
  

Well, truth be told, my script works fine when I run it manually from the command prompt. However, when the server fires it off … nothing appears on the screen but files are being copied to the right place by the batch file and then zipped. It’s all done silently.
   

The catch 22 however is that I wanted my script to delete the log.nsf and run a fixup -q on the usual databases that go bonkers after a server fault (admin4.nsf, events4.nsf, mail.boxes, names.nsf just to name a few) so that the server would come up a bit more clean than in cases where it starts up right away and is catching up doing the fixup on the databases while it’s trying to get back up.
  

So, because of that, I opened another PMR with Lotus Support to ask if there is some sort of switch or notes.ini that I should try to make my script run after NSD has done what it’s supposed to do but *before* the server is restarted … we’ll see what support has to say. However, if you are a guru in regards to “scripts to run after a server fault”, please feel free to post in the comments section your 2 cents on why this is happening to me (and your idea for solutions if you have any … thanks!).
  

Conclusion
  

Please use the utility responsibly! Don’t use it for your next April Fools prank … seriously, don’t. Friends don’t let Friends crash their Friends servers as an April Fool’s joke …
 

Thanks for reading!
  

Marc