Re: Value of contextCSN not persisted

["Torsten Schlabach (Tascel eG)" <tschlabach@tascel.net>]

Hi Quanah!

First of all: Thanks for answering the original question. I was wondering
first why changes to the database content as such have been persisted and
the new contextCSN hasn't until I found that this syncprov-checkpoint thing
actually belongs to the syncprov overlay. So I guess it makes sense to
switch that on as otherwise - for example after a power failure - I would
have lost information, wouldn't I?

Now please allow me some remarks about the part of your answer which I did
expect and where you met my expectation straight:

>>> We're using OpenLDAP 2.4.23 on Debian Linux. The backend is a
back-hdb.
>>
>> Upgrade.

I understand that the behavior which I asked about originally is NOT a bug
but "works as designed", so why should I upgrade then?

Actually, yes, newer is better most of the time in OSS land, but still, in
a production system IMO you cannot upgrade your software every week, can
you?

The other part of the problem is that OpenLDAP is releasing a lot faster
than most distros manage to update their packages. For example, in Debian
right now they are working on getting 2.4.25 into "experimental" while
you're at 2.4.28 already. On average, Debian as well as Ubuntu and others
are frequently 2-3 releases behind the current one.

I by no means want to blame the OpenLDAP team for releasing, so maybe I am
preaching to the wrong audience here, but I want to run my productive
systems with packaged software, not with software which I compiled on the
fly from a tarball. So it would be nice if the Debian team would just be
faster to package OpenLDAP and maybe move it to the volatile section of
their distribution.

Another alternative would of course be a PPA or any other mechanism where
the OpenLDAP team would release binary packages for Debian (and possibly
other distros as well) right with every new release. Or does something like
that exist somewhere and I just did not yet find it?

Regards,
Torsten


On Tue, 20 Dec 2011 17:01:19 -0800, Quanah Gibson-Mount
<quanah@zimbra.com>
wrote:
> --On Tuesday, December 20, 2011 12:54 PM -0800 Quanah Gibson-Mount 
> <quanah@zimbra.com> wrote:
> 
>> --On Tuesday, December 20, 2011 8:39 PM +0000 "Torsten Schlabach
(Tascel
>> eG)" <tschlabach@tascel.net> wrote:
>>
>>> We're using OpenLDAP 2.4.23 on Debian Linux. The backend is a
back-hdb.
>>
>> Upgrade.
> 
> 
> A more complete answer (other than you really do need to upgrade, and
for 
> sanity, rebuild the OpenLDAP you have against OpenSSL), is that you have

> syncprov checkpointing on.  So the CSN is only updated in the underlying
> DB 
> based off the period of time you specified to the overlay.  Thus when
> slapd 
> is running, ldapsearch is always going to give you the correct answer. 
> slapcat may or may not.  If you stop slapd, slapcat will.
> 
>>From the manual page:
> 
> syncprov-checkpoint <ops> <minutes>
>     After a write operation has succeeded, write the contextCSN to the 
> underlying database if <ops> write operations or more than <minutes>
time 
> have passed since the last checkpoint. Checkpointing is disabled by 
> default.
> 
> --Quanah
> 
> --
> 
> Quanah Gibson-Mount
> Sr. Member of Technical Staff
> Zimbra, Inc
> A Division of VMware, Inc.
> --------------------
> Zimbra ::  the leader in open source messaging and collaboration