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RE: BDB recovery after power outage





--On Monday, April 21, 2003 8:11 AM -0400 Frank Swasey <Frank.Swasey@uvm.edu> wrote:

Howard,
  The fact that the openldap administrator is required to run db_recover
manually after a crash of the BDB backend is NOT documented in the
openldap manual pages nor the "OpenLDAP 2.1 Administrator's Guide".  In
fact, "db_recover" is NEVER even used in the man pages or the
Administrator's Guide.

  Thank you, I now have a clearer understanding of why I think the BDB
Backend is, in my personal opinion, not ready for real use.

Frank,

I think this is a rather unconstructive comment to make. I have yet to find documentation in the openldap guide on how to create certs, manage my certs, or renew my certs. Why? Because that is a function of OpenSSL, even if that is a package that can be used with OpenLDAP. The BDB backend is one of SEVERAL DB's one can choose to use as their backend. I think it is stated fairly clearly throughout that when you decide what backend you are going to choose, you should do at least some reading on how to use that backend. I too did not know about the db_recover command when I first started using BDB. However, being the curious person I am, I did an "ls" on the bin directory of my compiled version of BDB and discovered it, and then went to SleepyCat's website and did some reading on it. As with all projects, the documentation that OpenLDAP has does lag behind. However, I find that in most cases, the documentation for the software product itself (OpenLDAP) tends to be kept fairly up-to-date. I do not expect, nor should anyone really, that OpenLDAP maintain the documentation for, say, OpenSSL, Cyrus-SASL, Berkeley DB, GDBM, mySQL, Heimdal K5, MIT K5, etc etc, simply because of the fact that they can be used with the product.

To say that BDB is not a viable backend because one has not taken the time to investigate how to use the software is flawed.

Regards,
Quanah

--
Quanah Gibson-Mount
Senior Systems Administrator
ITSS/TSS/Computing Systems
Stanford University
GnuPG Public Key: http://www.stanford.edu/~quanah/pgp.html