Re: Some interesting thoughts

[Howard Chu <hyc@symas.com>]

Quanah Gibson-Mount wrote:

> I've been having a discussion in #ldap with a Netscape user, and they 
> have a few things in Netscape features that make them prefer it over 
> OpenLDAP.
>
>
> 1) Database backups as part of a scheduled job.  It creates a backup 
> of the *.bdb files in a dated directory in the specified location.  
> Given the changes today to HEAD to allow architecture & release 
> independence of DB creation, this should be a snap, now that we have a 
> job scheduler.

Backing up the raw *.bdb files is still a tricky proposition, and it has 
nothing to do with architecture/release dependencies of the raw data. To 
guarantee a consistent snapshot you'd have to throttle all update 
activity, perform a checkpoint, copy the files, and then resume updates. 
So it's not a totally transparent operation. I suppose to avoid the 
lockdown you could perform the checkpoint, then copy the currently 
active log file(s), and then copy the *.bdb files to get something 
usable; it will require a db_recover if you ever need to reinstate the 
backup files but that's not too bad. If you can manage to copy all of 
the raw files before any new updates flush out of the BDB cache your 
snapshot would be self-consistent as well, but you can't rely on that.

--
 -- Howard Chu
 Chief Architect, Symas Corp.       Director, Highland Sun
 http://www.symas.com               http://highlandsun.com/hyc
 Symas: Premier OpenSource Development and Support