Convert Lotus Notes’ nsf files to mbox with nlconverter

Posted on September 2, 2010 by Kev

There is a great piece of software called nlconverter. It’s a tool designed to convert Lotus Notes’ .nsf files to mbox. It rely on win32′s COM/DDE API so it can only be used on Windows.

If you want to extract mails out of your .nsf database, this might be the tool you’re looking for. Bonus point: it’s written in Python !

Installing nlconverter and its dependencies

Here is how I installed nlconverter on a Windows 2000 (SP4) machine:

First I downloaded and installed the official Python builds for Windows (2.6.6 precisely):
Then Python for Windows extensions (build 214 for Python 2.6 in my case):
Finally I had to download the latest icalendar archive, then extract the \iCalendar-1.2\src\icalendar folder to C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\:
Next step is to download nlconverter itself and extract it:

nlconverter GUI

First thing you have to do is to create an export of your mails as a .nsf database. Follow the previous link to get the instructions.

Now let’s convert this nsf to a mbox. nlconverter’s FAQ tells you to run the gui.exe program to perform the conversion.

Unfortunately it didn’t work for me:

So I tried the alternative approach by using the command line.

nlconverter command line

Again, most of the things I’m writing here are based on nlconverter’s FAQ:

First, we have to download the notes2mbox.py script from nlconverter’s mercurial repository, as this file is not distributed in the winnlc-alpha-1.zip archive I unzipped previously. Let’s put notes2mbox.py in C:\winnlc-alpha-1\:

Now we’ll modify the notes2mbox.py script to set the password (via the notesPasswd variable) and location (notesNsfPath variable) of the .nsf file. Here are the modifications I applied:

--- notes2mbox.py.orig	2010-09-02 13:49:58.000000000 +0200
+++ notes2mbox.py	2010-09-02 13:51:24.000000000 +0200
@@ -14,8 +14,8 @@
 import NlconverterLib

 #Constantes
-notesPasswd = "foobar"
-notesNsfPath = "C:\\archive.nsf"
+notesPasswd = "XXXXXXXXXXXXX"
+notesNsfPath = "C:\\winnlc-alpha-1\\kevin-notes-big-backup-part-1.nsf"

 #Connection à Notes
 db = NlconverterLib.getNotesDb(notesNsfPath, notesPasswd)

Before running the script, we have to register a Notes DLL used by nlconverter:
```
regsvr32 "C:\Program Files\Notes\nlsxbe.dll"
```
And make the Python interpreter available system-wide:
```
C:\winnlc-alpha-1>SET Path=%Path%;C:\Python26
```

Now we can run the notes2mbox.py script:

C:\winnlc-alpha-1>C:\Python26\python.exe notes2mbox.py

If you’re lucky, you’ll get a nice mbox at the end of the process.

But I was not and the notes2mbox.py ended up with the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "notes2mbox.py", line 21, in <module>
    db = NlconverterLib.getNotesDb(notesNsfPath, notesPasswd)
  File "C:\winnlc-alpha-1\NlconverterLib.py", line 43, in getNotesDb
    session = win32com.client.Dispatch(r'Lotus.NotesSession')
  File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\win32com\client\__init__.py", line 95, in Dispatch
    dispatch, userName = dynamic._GetGoodDispatchAndUserName(dispatch,userName,clsctx)
  File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\win32com\client\dynamic.py", line 104, in _GetGoodDispatchAndUserName
    return (_GetGoodDispatch(IDispatch, clsctx), userName)
  File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\win32com\client\dynamic.py", line 84, in _GetGoodDispatch
    IDispatch = pythoncom.CoCreateInstance(IDispatch, None, clsctx, pythoncom.IID_IDispatch)
pywintypes.com_error: (-2147221231, 'ClassFactory ne peut pas fournir la classe demand\xe9e', None, None)

As you can see, I tried hard to make nlconverter working, without any success. But this should not stop you to try. In fact I suspect the Lotus Notes installed on my machine to be crippled or corrupted (can’t really tell). So you may be more lucky than me. In any case, feel free to report any success or failure in the comment section below !

Exim commands

Posted on July 28, 2010 by Kev

List mails in the queue:
```
exim -bp
```
View headers of a mail:
```
exim -Mvh <mail-id>
```
View body of a mail:
```
exim -Mvb <mail-id>
```
Remove a mail from the queue:
```
exim -Mrm <mail-id>
```
Remove all frozen mails in the queue:
```
exiqgrep -z -i | xargs exim -Mrm
```

Subversion commands

Posted on April 15, 2010 by Kev

Native commands

Revert current local folder to revision 666:
```
svn merge -rHEAD:666 ./
```
Create an empty repository:
```
svnadmin create ./my-repo
```
Dump a repository (a sure way to migrate a subversion repository from one version to another):
```
svnadmin dump ./my-repo > ./my-repo.dmp
```

Migrate a remote Subversion repository without creating an intermediate dump file:

ssh -C user@myserver.com "svnadmin dump /home/user/my-repo" | svnadmin load /home/user2/my-new-repo

Launch a standalone Subversion server listening on port 3690 and serving all repositories located in ./repos/:
```
svnserve --daemon --listen-port 3690 --root ./repos/
```

Local working copy hacking

Recursive and case insensitive content search on non-binary files from the current folder, while ignoring .svn folders and their content:
```
find ./ -type f -not -regex ".*\/.svn\/.*" -exec grep -Iil "string to search" {} \;
```
Same thing as above but with an alternative approach (that don’t work with large folder content):
```
grep -Ii "string to search" $(find . | grep -v .svn)
```
Other alternative: use ack.

Use sed to replace text in all files except in subversion metadatas:

find ./ -type f -not -regex ".*\/.svn\/.*" -print -exec sed -i 's/str1/str2/g' "{}" \;

Use svn delete to remove all files containing a tilde in their name without touching local subversion metadatas:
```
find -type f -not -regex ".*\/.svn\/.*" -name "*˜*" -print -exec svn delete "{}" \;
```
In a repository structure containing sub-projects (thinks of Plone’s collective repository as an example), get the list of all folders in all trunks, while ignoring subversion metadata folders:
```
find ./ -type d -regex ".*\/trunk\/?.*" -not -regex ".*\/.svn\/?.*" -print
```
Similarly to the command above, replace all occurrences of the string @coolcavemen.fr by @coolcavemen.com in all trunk subfolders while ignoring .svn content:
```
find ./ -type f -regex ".*\/trunk\/.*" -not -regex ".*\/.svn\/.*" -print -exec sed -i 's/@coolcavemen\.fr/@coolcavemen\.com/g' "{}" \;
```

Set a svn property to ignore all .mo files during commit in every folder of our local working copy containing .po files:

find ./ -type f -name "*.po" -regex ".*\/trunk\/.*" -not -regex ".*\/.svn\/.*" -printf "%h\n" | uniq | xargs svn propset "svn:ignore" "*.mo"

Web commands

Posted on March 26, 2010 by Kev

Download a web page an all its requisites:

wget -r -p -nc -nH --level=1 http://pypi.python.org/simple/python-ldap/

Create a PNG image of a rendered html page:

kwebdesktop 1024 768 capture.png http://slashdot.org/

Search in all files malformed HTML entities (in this case non-breakable spaces that doesn’t end with a semicolon):
```
grep -RIi --extended-regexp '&nbsp[^;]' ./
```

Here is a one-liner I use to ping some pages on internet to force our corporate proxy to refresh its internal cache:

for EGG in BeautifulSoup PIL Plone; do wget --server-response -O /dev/null http://pypi.python.org/simple/$EGG/; done

Create a minimal self-signed unencrypted SSL certificate without issuer information and a validity period of 10 years:
```
openssl req -x509 -nodes -subj '/' -days 3650 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout self-signed.pem -out self-signed.pem
```

Create a pair of SSL self-signed certificate and (unencrypted) private key (source):

openssl genrsa -out private.key 2048
openssl req -new -subj '/' -key private.key -out certreq.csr
openssl x509 -req -days 3650 -in certreq.csr -signkey private.key -out self-signed.pem
rm certreq.csr

View certificate details:

openssl x509 -noout -text -in self-signed.pem

OpenSSH commands

Posted on March 26, 2010 by Kev

Here is the syntax that makes scp support spaces (source):
```
scp foo.com:"/home/fubar/some\ folder/file.txt" ./
```

Copy a bunch of files to a remote server (or how to use find with scp):

find /var/log/ -iname "*.log" -type f | xargs -i scp '{}' kevin@myserver:/media/backup/logs/

Redirect local 8081 port to proxy.company.com:8080 via a SSH tunnel passing through the authorized-server.company.com machine:
```
ssh -T -N -C -L 8081:proxy.company.com:8080 kevin@authorized-server.company.com
```

Use rsync over different SSH port (source):

rsync --progress -vrae 'ssh -p 8022' /home/user/docs/ bill@server:/home/user/docs/

System & Shell commands

Posted on February 28, 2010 by Kev

Run a process detached to the current terminal:
```
nohup my_command &
```
Get the exit code of the latest runned command:
```
echo $?
```
Run the last command as root (source):
```
sudo !!
```
Show the user under which I’m currently logged in:
```
whoami
```

If you have the following error:

-bash: ./myscript.sh: /bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

Then the fix consist of removing the bad characters:

sed -i 's/\r//' ./myscript.sh

Free up some memory by clearing RAM caches (source):
```
sync ; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
```
Display which distro is running the system (source):
```
lsb_release -a
```
or
```
cat /etc/lsb-release
```

List of most used commands:

history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head

Disable a service on Debian/Ubuntu, then re-enable it:

update-rc.d my-service-name remove
update-rc.d my-service-name defaults

Same thing as above but on a RedHat-like system:
```
chkconfig sshd --del
chkconfig sshd --add
```

Kevin Deldycke

Free software engineer & wannabe videomaker

Tag Archives: CLI