Re: BDB 4.3 instability

["Sean O'Malley" <omalleys@msu.edu>]

As a point of reference, I tried building our DB (500k+ entries) on Centos
5.1 and it flopped miserably because of the db 4.3.

Fedora 9 with db 4.4 seems to be chugging along nicely so far. :)

Fedora 9 ships with db 4.4.x and openldap 2.4x and that is probably the
src.rpm I would use.  It statically links db into it so you won't run into
any issues with the versions db being mismatched.

You might also be able to swank the db tree from the Fedora 9 source tree
and drop that in the RH/Centos 5.1 src.rpm and just eliminate the issue.

However backup your database before trying this.
:)


On Tue, 29 Jul 2008, Howard Chu wrote:

> Craig Worgan wrote:
> > Howard,
> >
> > I am running OpenLDAP on a paired down version of RHEL5.1.  We build
> > OpenLDAP and roll our own RPM due to our requirement for the PPOLICY
> > module and our desire to be able to pick up different OpenLDAP versions
> > for new features and bug fixes.  Yesterday I tried building 2.4 due to
> > your recommendation from another post, and got the following build
> > error:
> >
> > checking for Berkeley DB major version... 4
> > checking for Berkeley DB minor version... 3
> > checking for Berkeley DB link (-ldb-4.3)... yes
> > checking for Berkeley DB version match... yes
> > checking for Berkeley DB thread support... yes
> > checking Berkeley DB version for BDB/HDB backends... no
> > configure: error: BDB/HDB: BerkeleyDB version incompatible
> >
> > During my investigation I discovered the FAQ about BBD 4.3 being
> > unstable.  I took this information to my platform/base team and we
> > discussed upgrading the library for all of our apps, as it's a commonly
> > used shared library.  They want to bring this info to RedHat and they
> > asked me to dig into the statement that BDB 4.3 is unstable.
>
> We tested BDB 4.3 heavily when it first appeared in 2005. In those tests we
> found that it tended to SEGV under heavy concurrent load. Building against BDB
> 4.2 showed none of these problems. You can probably check the openldap-devel
> archives from that timeframe for more details.
>
> I also forwarded this information to the RedHat/FedoraDS team when I saw them
> integrating BDB 4.3 support in November 2006, but they ignored the info.
>
> As usual, the RedHat folks are not only clueless, but aggressively so.
>
> > I do appreciate the help and didn't intend it to come across otherwise.
>
> Buchan knows what he's doing... If you don't want to follow his approach you
> might want to consider using commercially supported RPMs from people who are
> actually competent in supporting OpenLDAP (e.g., from Symas) to save yourself
> all of this hassle.
>

--------------------------------------
  Sean O'Malley, Information Technologist
  Michigan State University
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