Factotum: Documentation Handyman

I realize our own beloved DSC search engine has been updated recently, but I'm still liking this Sun Doc search that one of our writers put together back in May, based on Google coop. Give it a drive.

The Communications Suite 5 release includes support for Windows Mobile 5, to keep email and and calendar information in-synch. (Note: Even I found it a bit hard to find this in our docs; you have to go to the Communications Sync 3.0 Release Notes to find out that, yes, we do indeed support Windows Mobile 5.0.) When you install the new release, the Comms installer takes care of presence of only one data sync path between Connector for Outlook and Calendar Server, enabling your PDA with Windows Mobile and Communications Sync to sync email/calendar/contact info with Microsoft Outlook.

If necessary, you can download just the updated Communications Sync tool from the following download page:

http://www.sun.com/download/products.xml?id=45f95b76

On this page:

1. Click Download.
2. Log in with your SunSolve user ID/password.
3. Download the SunJava_CommsSyncTool_Suite5_Windows.zip file.

Every day I come across questions that ought to be in our Super Comms FAQ. That way, customers would be able to easily and quickly locate that kind of frequently-asked-for-information and get on with the task at hand. Where is that Super Comms FAQ located, you might ask? Well, right now, it's still an idea that I have, but believe it or not, I'm working on it. So stay tuned for details.

In the meantime, I'll be posting these faqable items to this blog, in hopes that such information is at least getting out to the community.

Today the question came up about cluster product support, including our own Sun Cluster software and Veritas Cluster Server, for Messaging Server and Calendar Server. I had to do some digging myself before I found it in the C5 Release Notes, but even that wasn't totally complete. So, here's the definitive matrix on this question, cluster products supported by both Messaging Server and Calendar Server:

Release	Sun Cluster (32-bit)	Veritas Cluster Server (32-bit)	Operating System
Java ES 2005Q4 and Communications Suite 5	SPARC : SC 3.1, SC 3.0 X-86 : SC 3.1 U4 Linux : Sun Cluster does not support Linux.	SPARC only: VCS 5.0, 4.x,3.x	Solaris OS 9 and 10

There was an interesting conversation on the Info-iMS alias last week concerning "bounced email" that caught my eye. Ah, another learning opportunity! To recap, then, here is another installment of Comms 101, courtesy of our Comms experts.

The specific error sited was:

nsmail Illegal host/domain name found (Too many failures to this host during this run; skipping this host: No such host/domain)

The short reply as to what's going on is fairly intuitive: the remote domain in question failed to resolve to a legal result, meaning that almost certainly this is a DNS issue (and not a Messaging Server MTA issue). Note that "other mail" will continue to make it through to your system (expected behavior), so don't be mystified by that activity. In addition, the error message is communicating that the problem has happened multiple times during the current operation (run) of the channel. The message bouncing is thus occurring because of an underlying DNS problem. To troubleshoot this problem, you would need to enable debugging (such as on LOG_CONNECTION) to determine the specific issue. Very likely, such a problem is transitory in nature but it is clearly not an MTA issue. Of final note: fancy configuration workarounds to such a situation are typically more work than troubleshooting and fixing the real problem.

The full detail on this thread can be found here:

http://lists.balius.com/pipermail/info-ims-archive/2007-April/027757.html

Update to Download the Calendar DST Fix Tool
Get this Sun tool (and instructions) to correct timings of events and tasks in Sun Java System Calendar Server, related to the DST switchover in US and Canadian timezones.

There is now a new version of this tool, which was released to SunSolve on 3/14. Per the Change Log on the DST Hub:

[2007-03-14] Added updates for DST Fix Tool Version 2, released 3/14.

New!  Download the Calendar DST Fix Tool
Get this Sun tool (and instructions) to correct timings of events and tasks in Sun Java System Calendar Server, related to the DST switchover in US and Canadian timezones.

Q. My Communications Express users are getting winmail.dat attachments to email received from sender's on Microsoft Exchange. Is this a Communications Express issue?

A. No, the Microsoft Exchange server needs to be properly configured. For more information, see:

How to Prevent the Winmail.dat File from Being Sent to Internet Users

(It's always nicer when the problem is another vendor's.)