testing disaster recovery?

[mjinks@uchicago.edu]

We're testing and tweaking our OpenLDAP 2.2.18 setup, db-4.2.52.NC.
In case it matters we're running all of this on Solaris 9/SPARC
machinery.

One of the things we need to have practiced and documented before
rollout is disaster recovery.  Okay, well I read some bdb docs, then
decided to try playing around with db_recover, but I'd like to have a
repeatable way of putting the database into a deliberately-hosed
condition so that I can watch how db_recover performs when it actually
has something to do.

The obvious thing seemed like issuing slapd a kill -9, but so far on our
almost-entirely-idle testing setup, the next run of slapd has been able
to start up and run as if nothing happened.  I suppose that I'd be more
likely to get a database in damaged state if I arranged to have a number
of ldap_modify operations running when I did the kill, but at this point
it occurs to me to ask whether there's some "neater" way to dirty up the
database, or if I've just got the wrong approach to this altogether.

So, I guess my question is, any recommendations for testing disaster
recovery with a dbd back end?  I'm new here so apologize if this is a
FAQ, a search of the archive didn't turn up anything.

Thanks, -mrj
-- 
Michael Jinks, ENSA, ENSS, VDN, NSIT, The University of Chicago, world