It's Sabotage...Well OK... not Really.

So, I'm sitting at my cubicle trying to sleep, when a tech from our Service Desk comes over and interrupts a fantastic dream about me and Angelina Jolie. We were sitting on the beach........OK, Too much info.....

He tells me that they received a few calls this morning that users are getting prompted for passwords in Lotus Notes. At first I didn't give it much thought, until I looked at my ticket queue and realized I had 5 people with the same problem. Shortly after that my manager and stopped by to ask me a question and in passing he mentioned that his single sign-on was also not working.

Sure enough, mine had stopped as well. After ruling out Gremlins, Sun Spots and Spontaneous Temporal Shifts in computer settings, I did a quick check of my registry. I found that "NPNOTES" was missing form the Network Provider Order entry; as you may or may not know, without that setting, single sign-on does not work. I checked my settings in Notes and the box was still checked to log in to Notes using the operating system password. Now I'm no rocket scientist, but if more than one person has the same problem, chances are the cause may be similar. I checked the registry on the machines that I had received calls about and sure enough they were missing the entry as well. I added it back on 3 of the machines and had the users reboot. Bingo, Single Sign-on was working again. So what caused the mass extinction of the registry settings?

Quick back story. We use a product called Radia to push out changes to applications and files remotely. We also use ITIL at our company, so we have specific processes around releases and how they are handled. I looked at the release schedule and it showed that just prior to the event, there was a release of a patch to an existing program. It turns out, our CHARM department ( Change and Release Management) had been receiving errors about a package that was failing during install. So they decided to fix it. The problem is, their solution included a line that overwrote the values of the Network Provider Order registry key. Basically wiping out the entry for Notes. So, I had found that something as harmless as "Fixing" a small and inconspicuous application could break my Lotus environment.

ITIL PLUG - If we had not taken the time to record the information about what was released, I never would have been able to track down what had changed the registry. Because I was able to match the CHARM release to the same time frame as the issues with Notes, I was able to find the problem.

After convincing them that they caused a the problem, they are now going to use the same Radia tool to modify the registry setting on everyone's computer to once again include the "NPNOTES" key. So remember, if Notes is broke, it may not be an issue with Notes....But any good administrator already knows that......