RE: Multimaster further work

[Adam Williams <awilliam@whitemice.org>]

>>to various web sites that have been running for 9-10 months at a time;
>>the only reason they restart is for software upgrades. There probably
>>isn't even 10 minutes of downtime per *year*. And if it fails, it will
>>assuredly take less than 10 minutes for failover to the spare server
>>to occur. As such, the spectre of "single point of failure" also isn't
>>very compelling.
>I strongly disagree. Are you telling me OpenLDAP doesn't need to offer
>multimaster because anyone should be able to keep his servers 3 nines
>up ?ver had to deal with a flooding like we just had in Germany ?
>Also, it highly depends on the application and environment whether you
>can easily switch to a backup system or not. And given the long history
>of index bugs ... no bashing intended, but I'm astonished to hear that
>you manage 9 months runtime. *We* had to regularly stop slapd to

9 months of runtime?  I don't see that as a problem.  Our entire network
depends on a 2.0.21 box that was installed in Febuary, it has been
restarted once to add more memory.  Just chugs along,  about four
changes an hour (which may be pretty light).

>First of all, in the current 2.1 code there is the beginnings of support for
>a feature we call "soft restart" - this allows you to fire up a new slapd
>instance while an old one is still running, with the new one taking over
>connections from the old one. When fully implemented, this will allow
>reconfiguration/whatever to be done on the fly, without clients ever seeing
>even a hiccup. As such, the issue of interrupting service for software
>upgrades, database overhauls, etc. will be eliminated.

This is excellent news.