RE: BDB recovery after power outage

[Quanah Gibson-Mount <quanah@stanford.edu>]

--On Tuesday, April 22, 2003 11:07 AM -0500 "Mark H. Wood" 
<mwood@IUPUI.Edu> wrote:

> > > 2) What is the daily process(es) that should be done to maintain the
> > > health of a BDB?
> >
> > Ours maintains its health with no intervention from us.
>
> Really?  You don't archive logs?

Nope.  We run a script to delete everything except the currently log 4 
times a day.


> You don't take backups?

As I stated, we export the DB to LDIF on a nightly basis

> You don't run
> the deadlock-breaker?

Have never had to do this, no.


> > > 3) OMG the power went out!  To recover the BDB, I do?
> >
> > I'd hope you made backups, either with BDB's tools to do so, or by
> > exporting your DB to LDIF... same as with any application's data.
>
> So, let's see, do we make backups of BDB using db_dump or db_archive?
> The answer seems to be, "yes."  Which to use now?  You see the problem?
> Frank can't just hope;  he has to *know* how to do this, and when, and
> why.  It turns out that the trail of breadcrumbs in the Sleepycat
> documentation is rather sparse in this area -- it takes a bit of creative
> suspicion to find your way to the procedural recommendations.
>
> Then there are the little matters, like, what are the consequences w.r.t.
> OpenLDAP of doing hot versus standard backups, since hot backups don't
> require you to take the LDAP service down but leave you uncertain of just
> what was backed up?  Some discussion of things like that, by those who
> know (not me, yet!), would be a welcome addition to the OpenLDAP
> documentation since it may indeed be specific to the way that OpenLDAP
> uses the DBMS.

I don't use db_dump or db_archive.  As I noted -- we use an LDIF extract 
made on a nightly basis.  So, I personally have no input into which of 
those methods is best, because that solution is not one we chose to pursue. 
If you want to think about what OpenLDAP provides as a backup mechanism, 
that is slapcat.  BDB provides db_dump or db_archive.

--Quanah

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