I suppose, more generally, I'm asking: How do a start replication all
over. What files can / should I delete. Which should I not under any
circumstance touch?
Others (Quanah) have mentioned dropping implementation of slurpd in
favor of i(delta-)syncrepl - requires upgrading to 2.3(.30 at the moment).
This site used to use slurpd with OpenLDAP 2.2. Before we switched to
2.3, we tested syncrepl slave DB rebuilds from scratch (empty DB, valid
slapd.conf and DB_CONFIG in the DB directory). We simply started slapd
on the slave machines and the small (about 40MB) DB was automatically
rebuilt within seconds (100Mb Ethernet and fast SCSI RAID5),
high-quality iron.
Having previously had to deal with the same thing with slurpd earlier, I
was completely gob-smacked.