The Four XPages Scopes: How Long Each Lives, What to Put in Each, and What Blows Up

XPages has four scopes — requestScope, viewScope, sessionScope, applicationScope — with lifetimes from a single request to the whole application. Pick the wrong one and values vanish or leak across users; but the sharpest trap is that scopes get serialized to disk, so stuffing a NotesDocument, NotesView, or an SSJS function into one eventually throws NotSerializableException. This covers how long each scope lives, how unqualified names resolve tightest-first, what's safe to store, and why you keep a UNID or view name rather than the object.

Field Notes from panagenda's MakeNotesFaster Webinar: Slow Notes Is Usually Configuration, Not Old Laptops

In panagenda's MakeNotesFaster webinar, Christoph Adler breaks HCL Notes 14.5.1 FP1 client performance on Windows down to two decisions: run the right version, configure it right. Here are the points most useful to admins — one brutal real-world customer number, why ODS quietly steals startup time on every open, whether you should delete cache.ndk regularly (he debunks the myth outright), keeping the data directory off network shares, the three traps in an antivirus exclusion set, and the Monday-morning checklist he closes with.

The Two Jobs of dircat: You Think It Only Builds the Directory Catalog — Since Domino 12 It Also Runs Entitlement Auditing

See dircat (Directory Cataloger) in show tasks and most people think 'directory catalog' — aggregating multiple Domino Directories into one lookup-friendly directory. That's its day job. But since Domino 12 the task quietly took a second one: aggregating each server's entitlement data into entitlements.nsf, a licensing-compliance audit with nothing to do with directories. This covers dircat's real job (condensed vs extended catalogs, and why DIRCAT5.NTF isn't CATALOG.NTF), its hidden second role since Domino 12, and how one task with two jobs bites.

Who Is the Domain Administration Server? One Domino ACL Setting Behind Entitlement Aggregation, CertMgr, and AdminP

An additional server cold-boots and floods the console every 5 seconds with 'Error connecting to server…', trying to reach every server in the domain. The culprit wasn't entitlement config at all — it was a single ACL setting that had quietly made this server the 'domain administration server.' This piece covers how many meanings 'administration server' has in Domino, what actually decides the domain-admin identity, which subsystems it silently drives (domain-wide entitlement aggregation, CertMgr, AdminP), and how to split those responsibilities apart.

Wiring Domino IQ RAG to a Remote Model: certstore Trust, the API Key, and the HTTPS Endpoint

Domino 14.5.1 FP1 added a Remote mode to RAG — the site's FP1 roundup already covered what changed. This piece doesn't repeat that; it fills in the wiring: how the Remote-mode configuration document is filled out, the HTTPS-only endpoint and API Key, and the step that trips people up — the remote AI server's trusted roots go into certstore.nsf, not the JVM truststore that the DRAPI path consumes.

@SetEnvironment and SetEnvironmentVar: Those "Environment Variables" Live in the notes.ini of Whatever Machine Runs the Code

To stash a setting from Formula or LotusScript, you've got a pile of look-alikes: @SetEnvironment, @Environment, session.SetEnvironmentVar, GetEnvironmentString. What they actually read and write is the notes.ini of the machine running the code — per-machine, not shared, not replicated. Plus a $-prefix rule that trips people up (Formula and LS prepend $ by default; reading a native notes.ini setting needs a flag). This piece pins down where they write, where the $ comes from, when to use them, and when to switch to a profile document instead.

The Unread-Marks Trap: They're Per-User, Not a Property of the Document

A document goes bold with a star beside it — the unread mark looks like a field on the document, but it isn't. It's one of the few things in Domino kept per user: your having read it doesn't mean anyone else has. Driving it from LotusScript with MarkRead/MarkUnread, it's easy to mark for the wrong user (an agent runs as one ID and only touches that ID's unread state); and unread marks don't replicate by default, so the server and your local replica routinely disagree on what's read. This piece explains the mechanism and three traps.

Execution Security Alert: That "Do You Want to Allow" Warning Is the ECL Guarding You

Run an agent, open a mail with a button, click a hotspot — and Notes pops an Execution Security Alert asking whether to allow it. That's not a virus; it's the ECL (execution control list) guarding your workstation. The ECL decides whether a given signer's code may run on your machine and what it can do; a signer not on the list, or one attempting an un-granted action, triggers the alert. This piece covers what the ECL is, why the warning fires, the difference between the workstation ECL and the Administration ECL, its relationship to signing, and how to set it.

Why Deleted Documents Come Back: Deletion Stubs, the Purge Interval, and Two Ways They Resurrect

You delete a document and days later it's back — not a haunting. In Domino a delete doesn't erase the document; it leaves a deletion stub, a marker that lets replication carry "this one was deleted" to the other replicas. Stubs get cleaned up on the purge interval (default 90 days). Documents "resurrect" for one of two reasons: the stub was purged before it replicated, or the same document was edited on one replica and deleted on another and the edit won. This piece explains the mechanism, both causes, and the settings that prevent it.