Best Practices to manage and maintain Domino Attachment and Object Service (DAOS)

Below are some basic points that one should remember as best practices to manage and maintain DAOS feature in IBM Notes Domino environment.

1. Domino server must be 8.5.x and onwards. All database ODS must be 48 and onwards.
2. Transaction Logging must be enabled on server and it is recommended to keep transaction log directory outside of domino/data folder, in a separate drive.
3. DAOS Directory path should be kept out of Domino/Data directory, in a separate drive.
4. Make sure DAOS Catalog Status always remain in SYNCHRONIZED status. You can monitor DAOS Catalog status using command ‘Tell DAOSmgr Status’. As far as DAOS Catalog remains in SYNCHRONIZED status, DAOS functionality will work fine.
5. If DAOS Catalog status shows ‘NEEDS RESYNC’ then you should get DAOS Catalog in SYNCHRONIZED status using command ‘Tell DAOSmgr Resync’. You can also using ‘force’ switch with this command to synchronize DAOS Catalog forcefully. The command would be ‘Tell DAOSmgr Resync force’
6. You can create a scheduled program document to run ‘tell daosmgr resync’ command periodically if you DAOS Catalog frequently goes in ‘NEEDS RESYNC’ status.
7. Regularly check disk space in Transaction log as well as DAOS drives and make sure there’s enough disk space available on server.
8. Make sure there’s a proper backup mechanism implemented to backup DAOS and Transaction log directories.
9. Exclude DAOS and Transaction log directories from OS Anti Virus Scanning.
10. Disable Transaction logging on System Databases like log.nsf, busytime.nsf, clubusy.nsf.
11. Never delete daoscat.nsf and daos.cfg file in order to resolve catalog resync problems. Deleting these files will reset DAOS calculations and deletion of NLO files may take longer time causing disk space issues on server.
12. Review your company’s regular attachment sending policy via mails and set DAOS attachment size accordingly to take optimum benefit of DAOS feature storing attachments.
13. Review your backup schedule and accordingly set DAOS deferred deletion interval which will delete NLO files with 0 references.
14. Enable DAOS on mail.boxes. Enabling transaction logging and DAOS on mail.box will enable the Router to optimize the delivery of DAOS based attachments. This can result in significant I/O savings for the case where the same attachment is sent to multiple recipients on the same Domino server.
15. On an AIX/Linux platform, never create DAOS Directory at root level. Always create DAOS directory as a sub directory of any other directory at root level. Please check below examples

DAOS base path:  /daos/xxxxx => Not Recommended
DAOS base path: //daos/xxxxx => Recommended

The information above is from TN 1683254