Consumer Initialization and Incremental Updates

During consumer initialization, or total update, all data is physically copied from a master to a consumer. When you have created a replication agreement, the consumer defined by that agreement must be initialized. When a consumer has been initialized, the master can begin to replay, or replicate, update operations to the consumer. Under normal circumstances, the consumer should not require further initialization. However, if the data on a master is restored from a backup, it might be necessary to re-initialize the consumers that depend on that master.

In a multi-master replication topology, the default behavior of a read-write replica that has been re-initialized from a backup or from an LDIF file, is to refuse client update requests. By default, the replica remains in read-only mode until it is configured to accept updates again. You set the suffix property repl-accept-client-update-enabled to on using the dsconf set-suffix-prop command when the oldest updates are on the read-only replica.

When a consumer has been initialized, replication updates are sent to the consumer when the modifications are made on the supplier. These updates are called incremental updates. A consumer can be incrementally updated by several suppliers at once, provided that the updates originate from different replica IDs.

The binary copy feature can be used to clone master replicas or consumer replicas by using the binary backup files of one server to restore another server. For information about how to use binary copy for replication, see Initializing a Replicated Suffix by Using Binary Copy in Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition 6.1 Administration Guide.