Re: running slapcat on a live openldap installation?

[Philip Guenther <guenther+ldapsoft@sendmail.com>]

On Mon, 22 Jun 2009, Adam Williams wrote:
> On the one on roark when I run slapcat it errors, why is that?:
> 
> [root@roark ~]#  slapcat -v -l /root/backup.ldif -b "dc=mdah,dc=state,dc=ms,dc=us"
> bdb_db_open: database "dc=mdah,dc=state,dc=ms,dc=us": unclean shutdown
> detected; attempting recovery.
> bdb_db_open: database "dc=mdah,dc=state,dc=ms,dc=us": recovery skipped in
> read-only mode. Run manual recovery if errors are encountered.
> bdb_db_open: database "dc=mdah,dc=state,dc=ms,dc=us": alock_recover failed
> bdb_db_close: database "dc=mdah,dc=state,dc=ms,dc=us": alock_close failed
> backend_startup_one: bi_db_open failed! (-1)
> slap_startup failed

I'm not sure if this is *the* problem for your situation, but it can 
certainly be *a* problem: if you run slapd as a non-root user or with the 
-U option to change its user id, then you should be running slapcat as 
that same user.

Why?  Because all the programs that open a Sleepycat/Berkeley DB 
environment should be run as the same user.  Otherwise, a transaction log 
file may be created by the wrong user, making it inaccessable by the other 
user, which will cause a database panic.  Yes, even a (read-only) slapcat 
process will create transaction log records.  It only happens if the 
transaction log is close to rolling over to the next file, making it a 
small window, but I saw it happen multiple times with a different project 
using BDB, so I know lightening can strike repeatedly.

If this is what happened then slapd will have died and you'll need to 
manually chown the transaction log files to the correct user.


The other thought is that the alock subsystem mentioned in the error 
messages depends on being able to hold kernel locks (fcntl() or lockf()) 
on a file in the BDB environment directory.  If the filesystem where that 
directory is located doesn't support file locks (NFS?) or the system has a 
hard limit on the number of locks allocated, then this may fail.  (But I 
would expect you to see those failures during slapd startup too...)


Philip Guenther