Novell eDirectory 8.8 Troubleshooting Guide - NetIQ

7Obituaries
There has been a great deal of confusion surrounding obituaries stored in the directory and, as a
result, some people have developed poor business practices to deal with then. Unlike some directory
products, Novell eDirectory ensures referential integrity between objects. For example, if Group A
has a member, User B, and User B is deleted, the directory automatically removes the reference to
User B from Group A. Obituaries exist as operational attributes placed on objects by eDirectory as
another way of ensuring referential integrity during delete, move, rename, restore, and other
operations.
There are three general classifications for obituaries:
• Primary obituaries include the types Dead (0001), Restored (0000), Moved (0002), New RDN
(0005), and Tree New RDN (0008).
• Secondary obituaries are generally associated with a Primary obituary and represent the agents
and partitions that need to be notified of the operation specified in the Primary obituary. They
include the types Back Link (0006), Used By (000C), and Move Tree (000a).
• Tracking obituaries include the types Inhibit Move (0003), Old RDN (0004), and Tree Old
RDN (0007).
Obituaries, with the exception of Tracking obituaries, must move through a set of synchronizing
states:
• Initial State or Issued (0)
• Notified (1)
• OK to Purge (2)
• Purgeable (4)
The states are recorded in the Flags field in the obituary attribute. Before an obituary can move to
the next state, the current state must have been synchronized to all replicas of the real object. In
order to determine whether all replicas in the ring have seen a given obituary state, a vector is
computed from the transitive vector. In eDirectory 8.6 and later, a nonstored Obituary Vector is used.
In previous versions of eDirectory, the Purge Vector is used. If the Modification Timestamp (MTS)
on the obituary is older than the corrupted vector, the server responsible for that obituary can
advance it to the next state.
For a Secondary obituary of type Back Link, the agent that holds the master replica of the object
with the obituary is responsible for advancing the states. For a Secondary obituary of type Used By,
the replica agent that created it is responsible for advancing the obituary states as long as that replica
still exists. If it does not still exist, the agent holding the master of that partition takes over
advancing the obituary states for the Used By obituary. For a Move Tree obituary, the master of the
root partition is responsible for advancing the states.
Primary obituaries can be advanced in their states only after all Secondary obituaries have advanced
through all of their states. After the Primary obituary reaches its last state, and that state
synchronizes to all servers in the ring, all that remains is the object husk, which is an object without
attributes—one which can subsequently be purged from the system by the Purge Process. Tracking
obituaries are removed after the Primary obituary is ready to be removed or, in the case of
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novdocx (en) 6 April 2007
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