OpenLDAP + RHEL4 - time to time database crash (BDB backend)

[Michal Dobroczynski <michal.dobroczynski@gmail.com>]

Hello,
Firstly a few pieces of information about the environment:

RHEL4 with OpenLDAP 2.2.13 (I read that it is a very problematic release...).
I use OpenLDAP for:
- users & groups --> further used by nss_ldap etc.
- PyKota --> printing account (lots of entries)
- e-mail server uses LDAP, too (in many different ways)
- netgroups
- samba working as PDC (66 machines in the domain)

Using: BDB backend
This OpenLDAP instance works as master LDAP; replica runs on Gentoo
(with newer OpenLDAP of course)

I have: ~400 users, ~450 groups, ~8 printers (and then every user can
see accounting information per printer), two netgroups with 7 hosts -
and that's more or less all.

For the past 30 days it happened two times that the database 'just
crashed'. For the first time I noticed that it was possible to
'slapcat' the database and suddenly at some point it was simply
stopping. Nothing else was possible. I'm making backups of the
database every hour.

Today it happened again. When I ran slapd with debugging options then I saw:
<notes about the release and compilation>
Initializing BDB database...

Yes, and that was all. Unfortunately, logging for LDAP was disabled
(and thus I cannot trace the problem this way). After restoring the
database (slapadd & CO.) everything started working like a bless.

I read today about the problems that 2.2.13 was causing and that it is
strongly recommended to upgrade it. I plan to do it over the night
today.

I post for the first time here - if you need more specific information
- inform me, please.

Regards,
Michal Dobroczynski