Symetrik Domino Consulting

I take a look at our admin4.nsf database every morning as part of the things that I “check on” in our environment.

I usually look for pending deletes that other admins in other regions don’t have the access to approve, or don’t know to approve.

I also look at the errors to see who is using an ID file with a public key certificate that does not match their person document. This error pops up when they are using a certificate that is different than the one their person document was generated with.

This disallows adminp to update the Internet password field with their Lotus Notes Client ID file password. That option is set in the user security preferences on the Security Basics tab.

This keeps the Notes Client and the remote webmail access password the same and simplifies administration of having to set that field, if you allow webmail access in your environment.

A couple of weeks ago, suddenly I noticed hundreds of documents in the admin4.nsf database that I had deleted months ago, and what’s more – some of them were for servers that we had removed from our environment.

I looked at the user activity to see that a particular server was the culprit. I went to that server’s copy to see who had updated the documents, I found that another server was the culprit.

It turned out that we had a server built to be a new BES server, but it got put on the back burner for a few months.

When we decided to implement it, we turned on the connection documents to the rest of the environment and put it into service.

WHAT HAPPENED:
The deletion stubs in all of the other replicas on all of the other servers had been deleted after 90 days. I believe this is the default for deletion stub deletion (correct me if I’m wrong).

Since those deletion stubs were gone, when the BES server replicated with the rest of the environment, instead of deleting them in the BES server copy of the admin4.nsf database, those old documents were written to the rest of the environment.

Be careful when leaving a server dormant for a while.

Another thing to watch out for when having replication issues is the “database properties\replication settings\other tab” There is a field called “This replica includes deletion stubs for all documents deleted since” field.

If you clear this field on all replicas of a database, you might be able to clear up illogical problems when documents won’t replicate between servers.

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