RE: BDB recovery after power outage

[Quanah Gibson-Mount <quanah@stanford.edu>]

--On Monday, April 21, 2003 8:11 AM -0400 Frank Swasey 
<Frank.Swasey@uvm.edu> wrote:

> Howard,
>   The fact that the openldap administrator is required to run db_recover
> manually after a crash of the BDB backend is NOT documented in the
> openldap manual pages nor the "OpenLDAP 2.1 Administrator's Guide".  In
> fact, "db_recover" is NEVER even used in the man pages or the
> Administrator's Guide.
>
>   Thank you, I now have a clearer understanding of why I think the BDB
> Backend is, in my personal opinion, not ready for real use.

Frank,

I think this is a rather unconstructive comment to make.  I have yet to 
find documentation in the openldap guide on how to create certs, manage my 
certs, or renew my certs.  Why? Because that is a function of OpenSSL, even 
if that is a package that can be used with OpenLDAP.  The BDB backend is 
one of SEVERAL DB's one can choose to use as their backend.  I think it is 
stated fairly clearly throughout that when you decide what backend you are 
going to choose, you should do at least some reading on how to use that 
backend.  I too did not know about the db_recover command when I first 
started using BDB.  However, being the curious person I am, I did an "ls" 
on the bin directory of my compiled version of BDB and discovered it, and 
then went to SleepyCat's website and did some reading on it.  As with all 
projects, the documentation that OpenLDAP has does lag behind.  However, I 
find that in most cases, the documentation for the software product itself 
(OpenLDAP) tends to be kept fairly up-to-date.  I do not expect, nor should 
anyone really, that OpenLDAP maintain the documentation for, say, OpenSSL, 
Cyrus-SASL, Berkeley DB, GDBM, mySQL, Heimdal K5, MIT K5, etc etc, simply 
because of the fact that they can be used with the product.

To say that BDB is not a viable backend because one has not taken the time 
to investigate how to use the software is flawed.

Regards,
Quanah

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