Replication can generally recover from conflicts and transient issues. Replication does, however, require that update operations be copied from server to server. It is therefore possible to experience temporary delays while replicas converge, especially when the write operation load is heavy. OpenDJ's tolerance for temporary divergence between replicas is what allows OpenDJ to remain available to serve client applications even when networks linking the replicas go down.
In other words, the fact that directory services are loosely convergent rather than transactional is a feature, not a bug.
That said, you may encounter errors. Replication uses its own error log
file, logs/replication. Error messages in the log file
have category=SYNC. The messages have the following form.
Here the line is folded for readability.
[27/Jun/2011:14:37:48 +0200] category=SYNC severity=INFORMATION msgID=14680169 msg=Replication server accepted a connection from 10.10.0.10/10.10.0.10:52859 to local address 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0:8989 but the SSL handshake failed. This is probably benign, but may indicate a transient network outage or a misconfigured client application connecting to this replication server. The error was: Remote host closed connection during handshake
OpenDJ maintains historical information about changes in order to
bring replicas up to date, and to resolve replication conflicts. To prevent
historical information from growing without limit, OpenDJ purges historical
information after a configurable delay
(replication-purge-delay, default: 3 days). A replica
can become irrevocably out of sync if you restore it from a backup archive
older than the purge delay, or if you stop it for longer than the purge
delay. If this happens to you, disable the replica, and then reinitialize it
from a recent backup or from a server that is up to date.
