We have a couple of servers that have been shutdown for awhile. They were never fully put into production. I’m trying to get the boss to ‘fish or cut bait’ on this. My fear is that if they ever restart these servers that the names.nsf (and other files) will replicate stuff that’s outside the history parameters. Like, people you’ve removed from the address book will be replicated back in from the dormant servers. That kind of stuff.
Where is this documented? What is the length of outage which may cause an issue?
Would it be similar to restoring a names.nsf file onto one server which was backed up a long long time ago?
Subject: What I would suggest
You are correct in saying that this would be like restoring an old replica of the Domino Directory from tape.
I suggest removing the names.nsf and admin4.nsf from the servers before starting them. If these servers were never fully in production but have replicas of applications on your production servers, I would remove those replicas as well.
Subject: PIRC
Purge Interval Replication Control (PIRC) is a new replication setting which is designed to prevent old documents which may have been deleted from replicating back into a database after their deletion stubs have been purged. This problem has been encountered by many customers. The most common case occurs when an old version of a NAB (Domino Directory) is brought back online after several months or years. When this occurs, previously deleted person documents, group documents, server documents, and other design elements can replicate back into the environment because the deletion stubs have already been purged. PIRC prevents these documents from replicating back into the environment.
Important PIRC settings appear in advanced database properties and replication settings only when the Domino server and Notes or Administrator client(s) run 8.5.3.
How PIRC Works
PIRC prevents documents from replicating back in two ways. The first is by modifying the ‘since time’ used by the replicator. If the server that is initiating the replication is release 8.5.3 and therefore PIRC-aware, then the algorithm to determine which documents qualify for replication has been changed to use the later of the PIRC date or the Since time contained in the replication history. This prevents the older documents from being replicated. Also, a DDM event is generated showing the number of documents skipped by PIRC.
The second way in which PIRC prevents older documents from replicating in is by stopping the documents from being added to the database via NoteUpdate. This method occurs when a non-PIRC aware server is pushing older documents to the PIRC-aware server. In this case, NoteUpdate code will compare the SequenceTime of the document to the PIRC date. If the document is older, a DDM event will be logged and the document will be rejected. Note that the source server is unaware that the document was rejected. Therefore its logs will show that all documents were successfully replicated. However, the PIRC server will log the server name and the documents that were rejected, thus allowing the administrator to track down old replicas of the database and remove them from the environment.
PIRC keys off the Cutoff date of a database. The cutoff date is the date when purge last ran. Purge is the process which removes deletion stubs from a database. Purge runs at one-third of the purge interval. So if the purge interval is set to 90 days, then a database may have deletion stubs up to 120 days old. Therefore PIRC will use this date to prevent documents older than this date from replicating into the database. If the cutoff date is not set in a database, which happens when replication history is cleared, the current date minus the purge interval is used.
Enabling PIRC
There are three ways to enable PIRC on a database:
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For an individual database, the property can be set via the Replication Options dialog box under the Space Savings tab. A check box has been added to enable/disable the feature.
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You can implement PIRC through compact. Compact ‘-PIRC On’ and ‘-PIRC Off’ will toggle the option. This can be used to enable or disable PIRC on multiple databases with one command. Note: This does nothing to existing documents in the database - for example, it will not remove older documents as the “Remove documents not modified in the last N days” replication setting does when the check box is enabled.
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You can set PIRC through the database options settings in the Administration Client. This also allows an administrator to set PIRC on multiple databases simultaneously.
See this Technote:
Purge Interval Replication Control (PIRC) prevents unwanted replication of deleted documents
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21501675 http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21501675