Monday, January 15, 2007

When emails return from the dead!

I have seen this issue come up a couple of times in the past in my environment, and it's happened again last week. I am running a Domino cluster for my mail hub and for the most part it does what its suppose to do. But since I had installed Domino 7 last year, something weird is occurring after one of the servers faults and reboots. Documents that were deleted in some people mail files come back from the replica on the other server. This doesn't happen to everyone, just some people and some of the times. So like any good Domino Admin, I called support. Luckily, I got someone that was already working on the issue with someone else. From the tests that we did using a database and NotesPeek, we were able to recreate the situation to show that we too are having the issue. The problem is the sequence number and time get lost somehow in the deletion stub. So when the server comes back up, the emails come back from the other replica. He did inform me that Lotus has created a hotfix for it, but it is going to require me to recreate the mail cluster by deleting all of the mail files off the clustered server, and re-replicate them after the patch is applied. No big deal. Just need to find some time to do it now. Of course, that will have to wait until after I get back from Lotusphere ;-)

2 comments:

Chris Whisonant said...

Thanks - I think I've seen this happen before. Do you have an SPR# for this hotfix? I would like to see what release it affects. We just got some new System i servers and instead of just moving my cluster servers' data to it I have already created brand new Domino servers and added them to the cluster. I was already planning on just re-replicating the data from the production server to new cluster mates. Sounds like it's a good idea now! :)

Andy Donaldson said...

Chris,
As soon as I get the SPR, I'll let you know. As far as how what release, it's happened to me on 7.0.1 and 7.0.2. I'll keep you informed.