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Re: contextCSN with empty suffix



Christian Kratzer wrote:
Hi,

we have a customer who runs an openldap installation with an empty suffix as in

    suffix ""

which is a potential problem when migrating to syncrepl as they do not have
an entry to store the contextCSN.

Actually it's no problem at all.

In our lab using openldap 2.4.19 we succeeded in inserting an entry with
an empty dn as follows:

    dn:
    objectClass: organization
    o: root

syncrepl and back-bdb/hdb would have created this entry automatically anyway, if it was needed.

This entry received the contextCSN entries and everything looks good
from what I can see:

    dn:
    objectClass: organization
    o: root
    structuralObjectClass: organization
    entryUUID: 6bd316a2-6f10-102e-904e-c754373eef36
    creatorsName: cn=Manager
    createTimestamp: 20091126194832Z
    entryCSN: 20091126194832.284443Z#000000#000#000000
    modifiersName: cn=Manager
    modifyTimestamp: 20091126194832Z
    contextCSN: 20091126194832.864794Z#000000#000#000000

I have no idea how ugly this hack is and am concerned this might break
with a future release when either searching for contextCSN below the suffix
is perhaps supported again or entries with an empty dn break.

I am about to advise the customer to move to a directory with an
nonempty suffix matching their root entry but would like to hear
nevertheless what you think of above.

There are some situations where this type of config may run into problems, but in most cases it works fine. For the rare problem cases, (e.g., using proxy syncrepl) an option has been introduced in 2.4.20 to allow the contextCSN to be stored in a dedicated subentry instead of in the suffix entry (See ITS#6373). But if you're not using proxy syncrepl, there's nothing to worry about.

--
  -- Howard Chu
  CTO, Symas Corp.           http://www.symas.com
  Director, Highland Sun     http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
  Chief Architect, OpenLDAP  http://www.openldap.org/project/