Making your Domino server unavailable for users

The title of this article may seem weird, but sometimes you do want to make your Domino server unavailable to users while still keeping it available for other servers and administrators. For example, when you’re in the middle of a migration, and you want to make sure that all the latest changes are replicated with replica’s on other servers, without users making new changes on the server which is about to be decommissioned. Also, during maintenance or troubleshooting this can help you test configuration settings and restarting tasks, without users noticing it (if your server is clustered).

There’s a notes.ini parameter to do this: Server_Restricted. HCL’s documentation explains it like this:

Server_Restricted

Enables or disables server access to a server.

Syntax: Server_Restricted=value

Description: If access is disabled, the server does not accept new Open Database requests.

Note: Any administrator can still open databases, even if this variable is used to restrict server access.

Use the following values to set this variable:

0 – Server access is unrestricted
1 – Server access is restricted for the current server session. Restarting the server clears the setting.
2 – Server access is restricted persistently, even after server restarts

The fact that administrators can still access the server, but users can’t, makes this a very handy setting.