IdeaJam(tm) feed for Jacques Page

Domino Administrator / Directory: Prevent address book to replicate with another one it has not seen in xTime

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 03:38:21 +0000

Author: Jacques Page
Tags: adress book replication
Idea:

I would like an option to prevent the address book from replicating with another one (same replica ID) if it has not seen in a while.

I would set mine to 2 months. If my address book as not seen you since then, there would be no replications (automatic anyway as it would be nice if it could be manually allowed.)

This would prevent any rogue address book from dumping documents and settings that have either been modified or deleted.

This would be especially good for administrators who take over domains as there is no realy way of knowing how many rogue servers exist in the environment and what practice the old administrators had to decomission servers. This could also be useful with other databases

Thinking more about it, it would be nice to prevent replication of the Names.nsf with ANY replica that is not officially on a server (such as a local replica on an admin desktop). This would help prevent an administrator from replicating the NAB locally, deleting half of it and have the changes replicated up..(don't laugh, I seen it happen...))

Domino Administrator / Admin Tools: Change ACL or change replicate with after use is moved to other server

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 03:18:20 +0000

Author: Jacques Page
Tags: Move user other server
Idea:

By a simple right click , you can move a user to a new server and even make a replica on the cluster of that server.

User comes in the morning and gets the new details added to their Location document. User will not even notice..

The problem is those with Local Replicas will point to the old database (which is now no longer in the loop of replica) until it is either deleted or the user forces a replication with the new server.

If the user does nothing, he/she can send mail but will not see new ones.. This usually opens a new call to the help desk.

I am thinking changing the ACL on the old DB or changing the replication location should help in this matter..

I know, we should keep that adminp clean and do the work as it comes but it is not always possible..

Thanks

Jacques

re: Prevent address book to replicate with another one it has not seen in xTime

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 21:41:52 +0000

Author: Gregg Eldred
Comment: I demoted this solely on the basis of your last paragraph. You had my vote for a better method of protecting your Domino Directory, but limiting it to only servers makes it difficult to fix problems that could be corrected by a local replica (the opposite of what you describe).

re: Prevent address book to replicate with another one it has not seen in xTime

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 23:44:33 +0000

Author: David Hablewitz
Comment: I think this idea has either been misinterpreted by the 6 developers who voted against it or those voters all work for Microsoft.

Just ask any administrator who has had to deal with cleaning up a database after someone replicated their local replica for the first time in a year and added thousands of previously deleted documents back would clearly see the value. I have heard many admins make this same complaint. In one case I encountered in a domain of over 90,000 users and servers all around the world, someone at a remote site turned on a server that had been decomissioned 2 years prior. This created hundreds of replication/save conflicts and restored tens of thousands of previously deleted documents. The massive replication storm alone as those changes replicated to hundreds of servers brought server replication to it's knees. But the worst part was that it restored some connection documents that resulted in replicating several mission-critical databases that were not supposed to. Recovery from both of this catastrophic event was painful and took over a week.

So can any of those uncommented demotions give a better reason AGAINST this feature?

FWIW, I have submitted this as an SPR directly to IBM support before even.

re: Prevent address book to replicate with another one it has not seen in xTime

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 20:00:48 +0000

Author: Jacques Page
Comment: HI Gregg

I am not sure about the last one too but I have seen it happen. Perhaps I am more scared than I should be here. Maybe we could have a switch to let that happen.. Maybe it would defeat the purpose...

I am not sure if all should be included but I am very sure I would like to have a lock option. As a consultant, the first thing I would do when I get to a new client is set the Names.nsf not to replicate with ANY server or replicat it has not seen in 2 months or more.

I have only 18 servers here and I am having fun running around rogue systems.. I can only imagine what a 200 server farm looks like....

Thank you for your comments!

Jacques

re: Prevent address book to replicate with another one it has not seen in xTime

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:06:12 +0000

Author: David Hablewitz
Comment: Precisely.

re: Prevent address book to replicate with another one it has not seen in xTime

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 12:10:03 +0000

Author: Ninke Westra
Comment: Actually I would like to see this for all types of databases, not just the Domino directory.

In the scenario where the client's configured with a local replica and a user has been away for more than 3 months (sabatical/sick leave) and they launch their client again old stuff will replicate back into their mailfile.

Another example I encountered last year at customer was where users would create local 'archives' by creating creating local replicas which in itself was not a problem until the clients were reconfigured for local but connected mode with scheduled replicatioin where some of these old replicas started to replicate stuff back to the server.

re: Prevent address book to replicate with another one it has not seen in xTime

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:18:17 +0000

Author: Alan Dalziel
Comment: Given that in most cases purged deletion stubs are the root cause of many documents reappearing in DBs in situations like this, perhaps an option could be added to space savers in Replication Settings to permit/prohibit replication when the gap to the last replication is greater than the deletion stub purge interval?

re: Prevent address book to replicate with another one it has not seen in xTime

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 08:10:31 +0000

Author: David Hablewitz
Comment: Nice idea. There might be other details for the developers to consider related to when the interval is changed, but you're dead on.

re: Prevent address book to replicate with another one it has not seen in xTime

Fri, 01 May 2009 04:28:40 +0000

Author: Jean-Yves Riverin
Comment: I promote but like Gregg, you should let the NAB replicate locally

JYR

re: Prevent address book to replicate with another one it has not seen in xTime

Wed, 27 May 2009 18:40:28 +0000

Author: Jacques Page
Comment: I think letting the NAB replicate locally is not a good Idea in any case. I would rather leave the Copy option.

I know, used wisely, it should not be a problem. But beside the Roge info, I had to deal with the results of an admin who replicated locally, deleted half the address book and .. well, you know the rest.

13 hours later we had it back on the line but all this could have been avoided by simply preventing Local Replication of the NAB..

Maybe I am over cautious. Then again, should we not consider the number of administrators who sometimes are more dangerous for their systems than viruses?

re: Prevent address book to replicate with another one it has not seen in xTime

Wed, 27 May 2009 18:42:27 +0000

Author: Jacques Page
Comment: PS: I like Alan's Idea. Prohibit passed the purge interval.

Perhaps we can add that to all the DB's

re: Prevent address book to replicate with another one it has not seen in xTime

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 12:33:30 +0000

Author: Patrick Polette
Comment: I like Alan's Idea. Prohibit passed the purge interval... as long as one can bypass this denial. It is often useful to be able to replicate documents after deletion stub have been purged (manually or automatically)

I dislike the interdiction of local replica of the NAB, this could be very useful on a normal usage. When an "admin" do such a mistake you described, there is nothing that can prevent it. He could have done it directly on the server that would not have changed anything.

Domino Administrator / Messaging Router: Place message on HOLD from the Mail.Box (Addition at end)

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:22:48 +0000

Author: Jacques Page
Tags: multiple mailbox message enhancement
Idea:

Hello

We came in this morning to find our 3 mail.box filled up with about 180000 warning messages from an SQL server that lost it... It was sending about 1000 messages per minute. This is the second time it happens in a few months

We immediately stopped the router and enabled a rule to put the messages from that sender on HOLD (pushed to all servers) then we proceeded to clean up all mail.boxes before restarting the router.

In the end, it took 2 hours to perform the cleanup. During that time, the router was down and no email were delivered. more than 3000 emails were accumulated when we restarted the router.

I think it would be nice to have a function where we could go to the Mail.boxes, right click a message and select HOLD based on the sender or the title..

This way, the cleanup could take a little longer but at the very least, valid messages would get delivered.

This could also be used for multiple reasons.. such as testing mail routing on new external systems using SMTP

I know Extrafax has such a function (although, it acts only on one message at the time..)

Additionally, would it be possible to add "Occurence" on the rule list (Along Sender, Subject etc) to which we could add a number? (ie: If occurence>60 per minute ) then we could deny or hold..

We could also have an additional action which could be "Warn someone"...

(yes, I was tempted to copy and paste those 180000 messages in the recipients mail files....:) )

Domino Server / Platforms: Multi core control for licencing

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:44:17 +0000

Author: Jacques Page
Tags: domino licencing
Idea:

Domino is still licenced on core value...

For quite some times now, it is almost impossible to get a 1 cpu machine with one core only. Everything comes in multiple of everything.

It would be nice to have the ability to install a Domino server and tell it to use X. amount of core. Especially for some specialized systems where 1 core is too much but the server came with 200......

I know we can do Virtual server (ESX etc) and control the cores but sometimes, we are required to do with hardware specs ...

This would help keep the licences in check

re: Multi core control for licencing

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:27:14 +0000

Author: Stephen Bailey
Comment: Totally agree. IBM's licensing core-based licensing model for SMBs is a mess.

re: Multi core control for licencing

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 21:25:13 +0000

Author: Michael Tassati
Comment: if it is to expensive for you: it is also possible to disable cores (ms windows and linux). This agrees with licencing.

re: Place message on HOLD from the Mail.Box (Addition at end)

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 21:36:37 +0000

Author: Michael Tassati
Comment: - good message: your server didn't go down!
- the primary problem is the sql server.
- if a mail.box is full and you have to cleanup - stop server and rename the file...now you have a lot of time for cleanup.
- every admin should have a little bit developer know how: creating an agent with simple action will bring you the action you need (5 minutes).
- DDM contains a "warning system"

In general there should be an action to "stop message".

re: Place message on HOLD from the Mail.Box (Addition at end)

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 08:59:24 +0000

Author: David Hablewitz
Comment: Michael said it well.
Regarding your additional request to throttle incoming mail, many spam filtering services and appliances do this. I know Postini (Google) does have a setting to reject connections from a source if that source exceeds a certain number of messages per minute. Effectively, your SQL server was spamming you.
I suggest you create a separate idea for this so it gets proper attention.

re: Place message on HOLD from the Mail.Box (Addition at end)

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 18:49:49 +0000

Author: Jacques Page
Comment: Good points Michael and David.

Although, taking the server Offline, renaming all 3 Mail.boxes and restarting is a solution, it come with some problems....
1- This is a Linux on z system. Restarting it is a gamble. It can take 2 minutes or 45 minutes..
2- in between all those 6 million mail, there are lots of valid and urgent ones that need to find their way to recipients.
3- I name this function here with the "spamming" problem but I am sure it could be used to many other advantages..
4- yes, there are many ways to do this but how simple would it be to have this right in the mail.box or even create a rule that can do it..

and 5--- We do not have Anti Virus on our servers... we already have 3 levels of checks done. We feel having one more on the server is simply over killed.. How many times should we check a message for virus?

We are discussing the problem with the source users/admins and asking them to reduce the warning frequency.. But I still think having that function handy would be a great asset..

Jacques