Symetrik Domino Consulting

Today,

I received an email/phone call/IM about a super-VIP user who’s mailbox in South America had a problem.

This user travels frequently, has a 23GB mailbox, and refuses to carry a laptop. He travels from his Swiss office to Hong Kong, Singapore, and South America.

When he arrives in Argentina, he expects his replica to be up-to-date without problems. The issue is that the database is 23GB and the comm links to Argentina are very slow, so sometimes, replication delay can be up to 2 or 4 hours.

What I suggested that we do is to create his mailbox on the clustered servers in Argentina and then get the Swiss and Argetina local IT staff to coordinate with us every time he is going to travel so that we can change his home mail server. This will mean that mail will not need to replicate to the Argentina server from Switzerland, through the hubs in Hong Kong before he will receive it in his Inbox.

For outbound mail, there is not an issue. Just set the home mail server in the location document on the desktop machine in Argentina to be that of the primary mail server in Argentina. The Domino server could care less what the person document says as long as it’s outgoing mail.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Argentina on some other issues and got involved in this case since this is a super-VIP user, and since the local IT support staff do not have rights to create databases or replicas on the Domino servers.

The local IT support staff had created a local replica on the desktop machine that this user uses when in Argentina from the Hub in Hong Kong. It took 5 days to replicate and something didn’t seem quite right with the database.

I fan fixup, and then compact -C on the desktop machine manually. Then I created a replica on the secondary clustered mail server in Argentina. I did this on the secondary server so that I could run some maintenance on it and know that the secondary server wasn’t that busy. I created the new replica, ran fixup, compact -C, and Updall -R. Then I watched as replication started from the Hubs to the secondary Argentina server.

Once, I was satisfied that the replicas weren’t corrupt, I created a third replica on the primary Argentina mail server.

I left it as it was and let replication from the hubs catch up with the Argentina servers.

Over the weekend, we got a notification that the super-VIP user would be showing up in Argentina and the local IT staff had the diligence to check on the database to make sure that it looked right.

To their dismay, the newest message in the Inbox was from March 5th (20 days ago). They frantically notified us, and I began to take a look.

I found this message on our Hub servers:
Error encountered replicating folders from mail\mailboxname.nsf to NotesAR2/DominoDomain mail\mailboxname.nsf: Folder is larger than supported, cannot perform operation.
Unable to replicate NotesAR2/DominoDomain mail\mailboxname.nsf: Folder is larger than supported, cannot perform operation.

After running fixup, compact -C, and updall -R which had no effect, but we did notice that replication was actually caught up because all of the recent documents that should be there were in the All Documents view. The Inbox view was not displaying them properly though.

I began to search through the Lotus discussion forums and came across this technote which described the situation:

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21102463

I used NotesPeek to look at the $Inbox properties and sure enough, it had reached the 50 limit.

I changed the “Remove documents not modified in the last” from 90 to 15 days on the problematic replicas of the database and then watched as replication caught up.

(exact setting location)
Select the local replica database icon -> Choose File -> Replication -> Settings, and on the “Space Savers” tab, change the numeric value next to “Remove documents not modified in the last” from the default of 90 to 15 days, and then click OK.

After 80 minutes of replication, I opened up the database and all was fine!