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Re: OpenLDAP 2.2 and db4 under RHEL4 on Xen 3.0

Michael:

OpenLDAP to sync.  Even at that point, when this xen machine goes into
production we have to, as much as possible, stick with maintainable RPM
packages that are vendor supported.  I've maintained servers using
source tarballs before.  It's not fun.
Rolling your own packages is sort of a requirement, even in this day and age of binary packages. OS vendors can't possibly stay on top of all of the different releases of the various packages out there, and so they are frequently behind and/or broken. Red Hat's OL packages are definitely broken.

Although it takes a bit of effort, dealing with compiling from source is NOT hard. If you want everything to live in a package management system such as RPM, you just have to take an extra hour or so and throw together a .spec file that works for you. If you prefer to not use a package system for things that you compile, then there are several techniques that allow you to keep that clean as well.

Regarding your Xen plan -- virtualization definitely makes servers easier to manage, as you don't need to worry nearly as much about library versioning etc. Xen is cool, but relatively heavyweight as it is still a full virtualization stack. I've had good success with, and recommend you look at, the Linux V-Server project at http://linux-vserver.org. I am successfully running almost all of my services inside of vservers (including the latest stable OpenLDAP), and am a much happier sysadmin for it.

Good luck,

--
Joseph Dickson
Unix Administrator - WEYCO, INC. | jdd@weyco.com | 800.748.0003 ext 1216



Howard Chu wrote:
Michael Torrie wrote:
On Sat, 2006-03-18 at 23:43 -0800, Quanah Gibson-Mount wrote:
I'm assuming by a "dbm" backend, you mean ldbm. Of course, ldbm is not recommended for use, because of its many problems. Honestly, if you are looking to run a directory service, I would highly advise you dump Xen, and use something where BDB is supported (and I'd suggest running OpenLDAP 2.3.20 (or higher, if newer releases have been made by the time you get to it)).

Unfortunately 2.3.20 is not an option.  This xen server (which is not in
production at this moment) syncs (or will sync) using slurpd off of our
production servers which are all 2.2, and cannot be changed until the
next hardware/OS upgrade cycle.

2.3.20 will accept slurpd updates from a 2.2 server. 
  I will be getting the syncrep stuff
going soon which I understand will can allow two different versions of

In general, if you want RPMs that are actually supported by a vendor then you should look into www.symas.com's CDS downloads.

Of course, we haven't looked into the Xen problems yet. I feel it's still premature; VMware on the other hand is a no-brainer.