A bunch of messages are pending delivery on a Domino 6.5 server (Win2000 SP4). They just sit there and don’t get delivered. (Meanwhile, other messages are coming in and getting delivered just fine.)
Tell Router Show Queue returns the following output (among other things):
32 WaitingForDIR Waiting for Directory availability
Anyone know what this means? Anyone know what’s causing the router to ignore these messages?
Search for WaitingForDIR in Domino Admin Help, this forum, and at Lotus/IBM Support all turned up zero results. Searching on Google turns up some NotesBench reports that list Mail.WaitingForDIR=0 among lists of statistics. But no explanations anywhere.
Found the answer in the 6.5 release notes. Here’s an excerpt:
In cases where a message recipient cannot be found in the directory and there is a replica of any configured secondary directory [that] is currently unavailable, the lookup task returns an error indicating that the results it returns are not complete. When this occurs, the Router marks the message with the status “WaitingForDIR”, and requeues the messages for a later attempt. This behavior ensures that an unavailable directory replica does not result in the server erroneously returning messages addressed to valid users. The Router also retries messages addressed to invalid, nonexistent users; for example, the Router may also requeue UCE (spam) addressed to nonexistent users.
A new NOTES.INI variable, RouterPartialLookupResults, lets you specify Router behavior in the event that a name lookup fails when a configured directory replica is not available.
The moral of the story: When all else fails (or even when it doesn’t), look in the release notes.
Subject: Remote-directory counterpart to Mail.WaitingForDNS, I suspect…
Does the console command ‘show xdir’ shed any light on the situation? I’ve not seen this particular status in our environment, but we’re using a single, local primary directory on our servers. Wild guess: you’re using a network-based directory in some fashion, either the central directory architecture for the local domain’s Domino Directory, or the more traditional Directory Assistance, and the remote directory is unavailable.
This is all armchair detective work, so I’ll be most interested in the correct answer. Please keep us posted.