Recommendations for an Operation Concept

Actions items which are strongly recommended to be included in an operations concept for DirX Directory are:

  • Deploy the latest patch available for the product version installed.

  • Periodically (e.g. daily), perform checks of disk space availability to make sure there is still enough space available for audit files, log files, backup files and LDIF dump files.

  • Periodically (e.g. daily), perform physical backups of the DirX Directory database using the dirxbackup command. Check physical consistency of backup file with dirxbackup –T command.

  • Periodically (e.g. daily), perform checks of database consistency using dbamverify command for backup files created with dirxbackup command. Risks can be minimized, if database inconsistencies are detected as early as possible.
    The availability of consistent backup files allows for fast recovery in case of failure.

  • Perform dbamverify –ATXDS on the backup file to perform the consistency check.

  • Periodically (e.g. weekly), perform checks of DBAM device capacity using the dbamdevinfo command. If fragmentation is larger than 60%, please perform defragmentation using the db purge –pob command. If space for entries or attribute indices is getting low, plan for a database extension in time.

  • Periodically (e.g. monthly), create LDIF dump as logical backup of the DirX Directory Database using ldif_dump. Check the resulting ldif content file for completeness and errors (occurrence of string #ERROR:)

  • Check for completeness of LDIF file: At the end of each LDIF file exported by the DSA a statistic is displayed. In order to check the completeness of the ldif export compare the # with the Number of processed records

Minor differences result from the fact that the number of processed entries exported by the DSA in the context of a ldif_dump or a create_total_ldif operation always includes the ROOT. The number of entries displayed by nmi show does not include the root and of GLUEs that might be located above the context prefix of the DIT.

  • Perform emergency exercises regularly to ensure fast failure recovery.

  • Look for DSA/LDAP server crashes.
    On Linux platforms look into crash directory. Every abnormal exit of the DirX Directory server processes leave a crash file.
    On Windows platforms a crash results in an event being reported in the applications section of the Windows event viewer (Exception code: 0xc0000005, faulting application one of the DirX processes, e.g. dirxdsa.exe).
    In DirX Directory there is an additional way to use the procdump tool in order to dump crashes into files. See the inline documentation of the variable DIRX_WDOG_[DSA|LDAP|PROGSVR]_DEBUG_MODE_ENABLED in the dirxenv.ini file.

  • Report crashes to DirX Directory support team. For details of the commands mentioned above, please refer to the DirX Directory Administration Reference Guide.

For each of the commands listed above, we strongly recommend the following:

  • Check the output of the commands carefully for error messages.

  • Check the exit codes of the commands.

If you cannot fix the problem based on the information given with the error messages/exit codes, please inform the DirX Directory support team about the problem.