Checkpointing and BDB

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

So I have a basic question as to the usefulness of checkpointing.  The 
stated purpose of checkpointing is to make sure that received writes are 
flushed to disk.  How does this help you if slapd crashes between writes? 
At Stanford, we have about 14,500 changes a day.

If there is one feature I appreciated about Netscape, it was that it knew 
what updates the slaves had or had not received.  Therefore, to recover a 
slave, all you had to do was load in a DB dump from a previous time, and 
that slave would be caught up by the master.  That does not appear possible 
with OpenLDAP.  The only thing I can see to guarantee consistency with 
OpenLDAP when slapd dies on a slave is to export the database on the 
master, copy it to the slave, and then copy it in.  Which makes 
checkpointing once again worthless.  I suppose it could be helpful for the 
master, in that you know you only have to go back say 10 minutes in time of 
your changes if the master crashes, to make sure it has received everything.

Is there a more elegant solution I'm missing here?

--Quanah

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