Enabling replication between multiple instances of the OpenDJ LDAP directory server is pretty simple and straightforward. You can check for yourself in the Replication chapter of the Administration Guide.

But fully disabling replication can be tricky with OpenDJ 2.4, mostly because of a known issue with the dsreplication disable –disableAll command : OPENDJ-249 : Doing dsreplication disable –disableAll is throwing a javax.naming.CommunicationException when removing contents of “cn=admin data”.

We are fixing this issue in OpenDJ 2.5, but for those who have deployed OpenDJ 2.4 and want to know how to fully remove all references to a replica in the topology, here are the steps to manually disable replication :

Note, all these steps should be done using ldapmodify, or an LDAP browser such as OpenDJ Control-Panel’s Manage Entry or Apache Directory Studio.

1. For each replica to be disabled connect to it on the admin port (4444) and:
   1. MANDATORY: set the “ds-cfg-enabled” property to “false” in “cn=Multimaster Synchronization,cn=Synchronization Providers,cn=config”
   2. OPTIONAL: recursively remove the entries beneath “cn=Multimaster Synchronization,cn=Synchronization Providers,cn=config” using individual delete operations. Note that the configuration backend does not support the sub-tree delete control, so this has to be done iteratively. This step is also not mandatory, since replication was fully disabled in the previous step
   3. MANDATORY: remove each entry beneath “cn=Servers,cn=admin data” except the entry itself. I find the easiest way to do this is to perform a sub-tree delete and then add back the base entry
   4. OPTIONAL: remove (purge) unused instance keys from beneath “cn=instance keys,cn=admin data” *except* own key. This step is really independent of replication: administrators should periodically purge unused instance keys anyway when they are sure that they are no longer needed (e.g. used for signing backups, etc)
   5. MANDATORY: delete “uniqueMember” in “cn=all-servers,cn=Server Groups,cn=admin data”
2. On one of the remaining enabled replicas, connect to it via the admin port and:
   1. MANDATORY: remove each disabled server beneath “cn=Servers,cn=admin data”
   2. OPTIONAL: remove (purge) each disabled instance key beneath “cn=Servers,cn=admin data” (see 1.4)
   3. MANDATORY: remove each disabled server from uniqueMember in “cn=all-servers,cn=Server Groups,cn=admin data”
   4. MANDATORY: get list of all remaining servers from “cn=all-servers,cn=Server Groups,cn=admin data”
3. For each of the remaining enabled replicas obtained in step 2.4 connect to it via the admin port and:
   1. MANDATORY: remove each disabled server(rsPort) from ds-cfg-replication-server in “cn=replication server,cn=Multimaster Synchronization,cn=Synchronization Providers,cn=config”
   2. MANDATORY: remove each disabled server(rsPort) from ds-cfg-replication-server in “cn=*,cn=domains,cn=Multimaster Synchronization,cn=Synchronization Providers,cn=config”