Quick guide to analyze client side NSD's

Yesterday, we had a customer who was experiencing the red box of death when replying to certain mime e-mail. Gathered up the NSD files and sent them over to IBM support. They quickly diagnosed the problem as an outstanding SPR to be fixed in the next release (of 7 - it's already fixed in 8.5). While I had IBM on the phone, I asked the tech the quick approach to NSD file analysis. He told me the first three most common thing to check on a client side NSD file.

Step 1: Search for 'Fatal'

The first thing he does is do a search for the word 'fatal' in the NSD file. That takes you to a section called 'Fatal Thread'. After that he takes a piece of the first line in that section and copies it to the clipboard. In this example he copied "nnotes.Panic@4+417" (see screenshot). He then pasted the text into a search of the Lotus Software Knowledge Base. He said that technical support pastes the entire section into the technote so it's a good way of searching and finding matches. If you don't have access to the Knowledge Base database, you can do this search on the web at the IBM support site.

Step 2: Look above to the 'Call Stack' section

Look right above the 'Fatal Thread' section for the "Call Stack for Process" section. Here he looks for the word 'spool'. He said a large majority of crashes are actually due to printer drivers.

Step 3: Search for 'Open Databases' section

Finally, he searches for 'open databases' section. Here you can typically find corrupt database pointers etc. At least you can tell which databases were open at the time of the crash which gives you a potential database to go after if you suspect corruption.

If all else fails, call IBM

At 800-IBM-SERV with your customer number ready. They have trouble with the really tough issues that are rare but they are great at reading NSD's. Here we are just talking about client side NSD's but servers are the biggest reason you would call IBM. There have been a couple articles written recently with a lot of depth about NSD analysis so you could google those but this is a shortcut to analyzing client side NSD's quickly.