Daniel Nashed's Blog

Preventing wrong server time and "time too far in the future"

"time too far in the future" beside database corruptions this problem is one of the most critical issues you can run into.

- Database modified date is in the future
- All new documents have created date in the future based on this value (because time in a database never goes backward)
- Replication history is in future --> issues with replication
- View/Folder update time is in future --> index might not be updated

Not all issues can be completely reverted in an easy way.
You might be able to fix most of it by pulling a new replica.
But even that might not resolve all issues.

We had this issue again at a customer because of a wrong BIOS time after restart.
So I am finally looking into the new Domino 8 functionality to prevent servers from re-starting after a certain time has passed.

Domino keeps track of the time of the server in the notes.ini in via LAST_DOMINO_TIME (example: LAST_DOMINO_TIME=004EF4F1C1257A2E)
You can specify a time interval to prevent a server from starting if it was down for more than this time.

There are two notes.ini parameters involved:

Restart_Time_Action=1
Restart_Time_Interval=3600 (in seconds, smallest value is 300 seconds according to a TN)

I would set this parameter to at least 24 hours or maybe 48 hours just to be on the save side.

If the interval has been reached the server will not start and you will not see any log message about that.
The only hint is a new notes.ini entry like this

LAST_DOMINO_TIME_ABORT=16.07.2012 09:56:49 Startup aborted: Excess restart time interval.

will be added to the notes.ini


-- Daniel

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