Re: Best and most efficient way to upgrade openLDAP

[Howard Chu <hyc@symas.com>]

Ghyslain Tissot wrote:
> Hello,
>    We are looking for input on how to upgrade openLDAP from 2.2 to 2.3. We
> have looked and it seems the only documented way to upgrade is by unloading
> and reloading the data which is very time consuming (approx. 8-10 hours).
> Since this is a production system it is not adequate. What options are available?

You should realize that you're moving from one unsupported release to another 
unsupported release, both have been obsoleted by OpenLDAP 2.4 for a number of 
years already.

> To give more more background:
>
> - there are currently approximately 7M entries in the LDAP;
> - we are migrating to a new server with a new version of openLDAP (dependant
> on RHEL version - previously RHEL 4 now RHEL 5);
> - we tried the option creating a staging server with 2.2 and importing on the
> new system (v2.3) the extracted data on the new system. Then we activated
> replication (SLURPD) between the two and tried updating the staging server
> with the transaction logs of production hoping the data would then replicate
> to the new system. But that does not work.

Despite slurpd's many flaws, this approach should have worked fine. Since you 
provide no details, there's no way to tell what went wrong. But in the 
meantime, slurpd is also obsolete and no longer supported.

> Any ideas on how it can be done with minimal impact to the current LDAP and
> reducing the outage period?

The outage period should only last as long as it takes to run slapcat on your 
current server. I would go one step further: edit your 2.2 slapd.conf and turn 
on read-only mode - then your outage for servicing reads is only as long as it 
takes to restart the server. Once the server is in read-only mode you can run 
slapcat while slapd is running so there's no further service impact.

Loading on the new server, read the new slapadd(8) manpage, look at using the 
-q option.

Do yourself a favor and use OpenLDAP 2.4. Questions about 2.3 or older will be 
ignored by the Project.

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