When removing a server from the topology, the remaining servers need to be made aware of the change. If the server to remove is online, only one invocation of dsreplication disable is necessary. If the server to remove is offline, the following steps are required:

  1. Run remove-defunct-server from another server in the topology.
  2. Run remove-defunct-server on the offline server to removed.

Similar to the enable command, more that 50% of servers not being removed from the topology must be online during the process.

If additional servers are offline and cannot be online while removing the server, you must distinguish between offline servers that are offline permanently and those that are offline temporarily. If servers are offline permanently, use remove-defunct-server to remove them. If servers are offline temporarily, they update automatically after they are online. The following examples show the steps in more detail:

  • Removing a server that is still online. The dsreplication disable command can be run from any server, but a majority of servers in the topology need to be online.
    $ bin/dsreplication disable --hostname austin03.example.com --port 1389 \
      --baseDN dc=example,dc=com --adminUID admin --adminPassword password \
      --no-prompt
  • Removing a server that is offline.The remove-defunct-server tool can be run against any server not being removed from the topology. More than 50% of servers in the topology must be online. The remove-defunct-server tool can be issued after setting the JVM property "com.unboundid.connectionutils.LdapResponseTimeoutMillis" to change the default ten-minute timeout for each server to take out of rotation. If multiple servers need to be removed, this approach speeds up the process.
    $ bin/remove-defunct-server --serverInstanceName austin01 \
      --bindDN "cn=Directory Manager" --bindPassword password

    To remove any topology references, run the remove-defunct-server tool on each server that is removed from the topology, as follows:

    $ bin/remove-defunct-server --no-prompt

The option --ignore-online removes an online server cleanly from the topology.