Re: alock File Keeps LDAP (slapd) from Starting Up

[Howard Chu <hyc@symas.com>]

Ramseyer, Ken wrote:
> We have just recently moved from Red Hat's Linux Fedora Core 4 to Red
> Hat's Linux Enterprise OS.  In the process of moving to a new OS, we
> changed from OpenLDAP version 2.2.23 to version 2.3.20.  Now, every time
> we start slapd, along with the standard *.dbb files, it creates an
> "alock" file in the LDAP directory.  If we kill (kill -9) slapd and
> restart slapd, LDAP works fine; however, if we reboot the hardware unit
> the "alock" file keeps LDAP from starting up.  After rebooting, if we
> delete the "alock" file, LDAP can be restarted and it works fine.  We
> are running with Berkeley DB (libdb4.2), and libsasl2.0.20 (or SASL
> 2.1.20).  Who creates, updates, and deletes the "alock" file (OpenLDAP
> or Berkeley DB)?  Before we moved to a new OS and OpenLDAP, we never saw
> the "alock" file appear in the LDAP directory.  Now the "alock" file
> shows up all the time.  Can we just delete the "alock" file before we
> start slapd?

It sounds like your slapd boot script is doing an explicit db_recover. 
You should not do that with OpenLDAP 2.3.

If you have done a db_recover, you can delete the alock file. Normally 
you should not do either of those things, and just let OpenLDAP manage 
things by itself.

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