Tag: pebkac

  • DME Sync: "Invalid or expired certificate"

    My employer uses DME Sync to synchronise email, calendar and contacts from Lotus Notes to mobile phones. A nifty little app, it basically connects to the webmail server, then downloads and uploads the relevant data. This makes for smooth migration from one phone to another, and means the users have the data where they need it, when they need it.
     
    I recently pushed the app to a user’s phone, only to have the user tell me the install failed. He said it flashed an error message saying “Invalid or expired certificate”. No matter how many times I repushed the package, he’d get this error.
     
    Consulting with one of the admins for the system, I asked the user to check if the date setting was correct. As it turned out, it wasn’t. As soon as the user set the correct time and date, the install went through without a hitch.

  • Don’t argue, just do it!

    One of the tasks I am called upon to perform as part of my job as a desktop service tech is checking and troubleshooting VPN login. One fo the ways I do this is to log in as the user on my own machine. My employer uses RSA SecureID key fobs combined with a personal password for authentication.
     
    As you may or may not know, RSA SecureID key fobs change the code they display every 60 seconds. Almost invariably, when I ask the user what the current code is, I am told to wait, as it is about to change. All well and good so far. Twenty seconds later, the code changes, and the user tells me what the new code is.
     
    At the end of it all, I am left wondering, wouldn’t it be quicker to give me the code in the first place, instead of arguing?

  • Lotus Notes: Notes automatically deletes email

    A while back, a user called in, telling me that he had lost a lot of important email. All of the emails he lost were roughly three months old, and he’d lost all of his emails that were older than three months.
     
    The cause of this problem was that the user had set a flag in his Replication settings, instructing Notes to delete emails older than 90 days. After removing this flag, the user no longer had this problem: