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.
Very excellent news.
-- Quanah Gibson-Mount Senior Systems Administrator ITSS/TSS/Computing Systems Stanford University GnuPG Public Key: http://www.stanford.edu/~quanah/pgp.html