Re: alock File Keeps LDAP (slapd) from Starting Up

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

--On Thursday, May 25, 2006 12:33 PM -0400 "Ramseyer, Ken" 
<ken.ramseyer@lmco.com> wrote:

> We have just recently moved from Red Hat's Linux Fedora Core 4 to Red
> Hat's Linux Enterprise OS.  In the process of moving to a new OS, we
> changed from OpenLDAP version 2.2.23 to version 2.3.20.  Now, every time
> we start slapd, along with the standard *.dbb files, it creates an
> "alock" file in the LDAP directory.  If we kill (kill -9) slapd and
> restart slapd, LDAP works fine; however, if we reboot the hardware unit
> the "alock" file keeps LDAP from starting up.  After rebooting, if we
> delete the "alock" file, LDAP can be restarted and it works fine.  We
> are running with Berkeley DB (libdb4.2), and libsasl2.0.20 (or SASL
> 2.1.20).  Who creates, updates, and deletes the "alock" file (OpenLDAP
> or Berkeley DB)?  Before we moved to a new OS and OpenLDAP, we never saw
> the "alock" file appear in the LDAP directory.  Now the "alock" file
> shows up all the time.  Can we just delete the "alock" file before we
> start slapd?

It sounds like you are using ldbm, which is your first problem.  That is a 
known unstable database backend which has been removed from OpenLDAP 2.4.

alock is an autorecovery mechanism introduced in the OpenLDAP 2.3 release 
to assist with autorecovery.  Given more information on the error messages 
coming from alock would be useful, since it is supposed to help you recover 
from hard reboots gracefully.


--Quanah

--
Quanah Gibson-Mount
Principal Software Developer
ITS/Shared Application Services
Stanford University
GnuPG Public Key: http://www.stanford.edu/~quanah/pgp.html