9.0 Obituaries

Obituaries serve as operational attributes that eDirectory places on objects to ensure referential integrity during operations such as delete, move, rename, and restore. 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. In eDirectory 8.8 SP 8, the obituaries generated by the Delete, Move, and Rename operations are optimized by default.

NOTE:Objects with obituaries are considered every time an agent outbound synchronizes, and by the obituary process, which is scheduled to run at the end of an inbound synchronization cycle.

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 non-stored 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 computed 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 Inhibit_move, the Tracking obituary is removed after the Primary obituary has moved to the OBF_NOTIFIED state on the master replica.

The replica responsible for processing obituaries does so on a background process (the Obituary Process), which is scheduled on a per-partition basis after a given partition finishes an inbound synchronization cycle. If there are no other replicas of the partition, the Outbound Replication Process is still scheduled on the heartbeat interval. The Outbound Replication Process then starts the Obituary Process. The Obituary Process cannot be manually scheduled, nor does it need to be. As synchronization occurs, the transitive vectors are updated, thus advancing the Purge Vector and Obit Vector. As these vectors move forward, the obituary states are allowed to move forward. This, together with the automatic scheduling done upon inbound synchronization, completes the obituary processing cycle. Therefore, the lifeblood of obituary processing is object synchronization.

For an object that is being removed, after all obituaries whose associated Primary obituary is of type Dead have been advanced to the last state (Purgeable), and that state has been synchronized to all replicas, a new process is responsible for removing the remaining entry husk from the database. The Purge Process runs automatically to remove these husks. You can manually schedule the Purge Process and modify its automatic schedule interval by using the Agent Configuration page in iMonitor.