Symetrik Domino Consulting

Today, while working in Argentina, I started receiving hundreds of notifications (events4.nsf) that database after database was corrupt. This was a bit worrying to say the least especially because several system databases were among the list of databases being reported.

This presents several problems.
1. Database corrupt (obviously)
2. Hundreds if not thousands of notifications emails clogging up our admin mailboxes
3. The main support team in HK are sleeping right now.
4. I have no direct way to connect to the server in India from Buenos Aires through PCAnywhere or Remote Desktop.

I was able to get to the server console via passthru through one of our hub servers in Hong Kong.

All of our sites are not directly connected to each other, but they are all connected to our main site in HK, so passthru actually comes in handy sometimes when working at another site.

When I connected to remote console, the first message I saw was “unable to record to log – log.nsf corrupt”

Now it’s really getting bad!

I have seen a backup agent that was not properly configured create similar problems where the backup agent is not utilizing an open file agent, or a domino specific agent. It grabs the files while Domino is still up and thus causes corruption.

It could also be anti-virus solutions.

The only thing I could think to do was to issue the “restart server” at the console.

This will automatically shut down the domino tasks and restart Domino 10 seconds later.

I figure that this would stop the mass flood of emails coming in, and if the server came back up it would automatically run a consistency check of the databases that were corrupt.

It would probably minimize the number of databases that were corrupted by just shutting the server down anyways. Hopefully, whatever was causing the corruption would go about it’s business after Domino got out of the way.

The joys of remote admining.

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