Windows sysinternals

The Case of the Failed Lotus Notes Backups
Chapter 16 Error Messages 387
A sysadmin reported that Lotus Notes backups began failing, displaying the error shown in
Figure 16-6: “none of the files in the file list exist.”
FIGURE 16-6 Lotus Notes backups failing.
He checked the backup application’s log, which reported a DLL load failure for nnotes.dll.
(See Figure 16-7.) He found it odd that the reported DLL file path was in a folder belonging
to a completely different application.
FIGURE 16-7 Backup application log showing DLL load failure for nnotes.dll.
He ran Procmon and tried to initiate the backup. Applying a filter for the backup application
and all its child processes, he pressed Ctrl+F and searched for the first instances of
“\nnotes.dll” in the trace. He found a sequence of QueryOpen calls (shown in Figure 16-8)
trying to open the file in different folders, each failing with NAME NOT FOUND until it was
finally found in C:\Program Files\BMC Software\MasterCell\server\bin. (The sysadmin says
that some of these folders are in the PATH environment variable and that others are added
by the backup application at runtime.)
FIGURE 16-8 Searching for nnotes.dll in several directories until found in the selected row.
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