RE: AW: Partitioning questions II

["Mark H. Wood" <mwood@IUPUI.Edu>]

On Mon, 18 Jun 2001, Dan Shriver wrote:
> From: Tiefnig Daniel <daniel.tiefnig@infonova.at>
> My understanding is that if you want to add/remove/modify
> entries you have to go through the master?  Am I wrong here?

No.  What you are missing is that each partition is embodied in a master
and zero or more slaves.  If you have partitioned your tree then you have
more than one master, even though each is master *only* of its own
partition.

> In any case, the design I'd like would have one "master" who
> deals with all such requests and if it doesn't own the entry (a
> delegated subtree ("partitioning")) it adds the entry to the
> appropriate slave.  I understand that in a normal case it adds
> the entry to itself and then replicates down to the slave, but
> shouldn't it be using a similar mechanism (following the
> referral and doing an action similar to replication on the
> appropriate slave)?
>
> I'm stuck in a "chicken and egg" problem here.

It is a problem of your own making.  Once you give up the notion that an
inferior server is a slave, it should all become clear.  One of the
inferiors must be a master, and that is the server which receives updates
on behalf of its partition.

[snip]
> Obviously I am very confused, but I don't have another
> conceptual model to use here.  How are things supposed to work?
> Is there a good reference for how I should be looking at this
> problem?

See _Understanding LDAP_ (IBM, SG24-4986-00, I think you can find it at
redbooks.ibm.com) section 2.2.2.2 (Suffixes and referrals).  Also Novell
has a huge volume of NDS documentation online
(http://www.novell.com/documentation/Ig/nds73/docui/index.html, for
example), and their explanations and diagrams are good.  And of course for
OpenLDAP you should study the Administrator's Guide.

-- 
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer   mwood@IUPUI.Edu
Make a good day.