Notes/Domino Best Practices: Administration Process

Introduction
The Administration Process is a program that automates many routine administrative tasks such as renaming groups and people and mail file and replica management. The Domino Administration Guide provides a more thorough description of the Administration Process.

It is vital for administrators to understand the Administration Process in order to maintain a healthy Domino environment. To that end, this document contains a list of Technotes, developerWorks articles, Redbooks and Redpapers that encompass existing Best Practices materials for Notes/Domino 6 and 7.

General rules There are some general rules that apply to a well maintained Administration Process:

• Only replicate from the administration server. Never replicate from another replica copy on a spoke server.
  
  
• Always use pull-push when replicating the administration database (admin.nsf). Pull replication is important as AdminP is expecting responses back, such as acknowledgements, status or errors.
  
  
• IBM recommends the cut-off interval be 7 to 14 days and should never be set to more than 21 days to help reduce the size of the administration database.
  
  
• All replica copies of admin4.nsf should have identical cut-off intervals that are equal to or less than the source on the administration server. Cutoff intervals that are out of sync sometimes lead to old data reappearing.
  
  
• If a server has been down for a long period of time, or if replication of the admin4.nsf has not occurred for several days, do not attempt to replicate, as deletion stubs may have expired. Instead, delete or rename the database and create a new replica copy from the source on the administration server. This action will prevent deleted or changed documents from being reinstated. This is good practice for all Domino applications.