Henning, I agree completely with everything you said. I don't like the
method OpenLDAP recommends to terminate slapd either.
I feel that you are the more appropriate person to file this terminate slapd
design flaw bug report to OpenLDAP. I am just a newbie to both OpenLDAP and
Qmail, and you are an well-known, acknowledged, authority per your Life with
Qmail-LDAP document and your contributions to this mail list and other mail
lists.
In the meantime, until OpenLDAP corrects their slapd shutdown method, what
do you recommend that I (and others) do?
>From: Henning Brauer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: Re: slapd start/stop
>Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2001 19:48:33 +0200
>
>On Mon, Jul 09, 2001 at 05:16:14PM -0000, pop corn wrote:
> > I already did a "man svc". Here are two quotes:
> > From the OpenLDAP 2.0 Administrator's Guide at:
> > http://www.openldap.org/doc/admin/runningslapd.html#Stopping slapd
> > 6.3. Stopping slapd
> > To kill off slapd safely, you should give a command like this
> > kill -INT `cat /usr/local/var/slapd.pid`
> > where /usr/local/var is determined by configure.
> > Killing slapd by a more drastic method may cause information loss or
> > database corruption.
>
>This is a dramatic design failure in OpenLDAP. What happens on system
>shutdown? Right, all processes get a TERM signal.
>I haven't read these statements until today, but it explains OpenLDAPs poor
>behaviour (meaning database not beeing writeable any longer) twice a year
>or
>so. Who files a bug report?
>
>Oh, I hear you saying: just use kill -INT blabla in your
>/etc/rc.d/rc.2/slapd or whatever it is. But Note that this is SysV
>specific,
>and there are non-SysV unices around (all BSDs for example), and this is a
>Good Thing (tm). I really don't like this SysV init style, but I'll stop my
>rant now.
>
>Nontheless, instead of working around this OpenLDAP bug in daemontools fix
>OpenLDAP.
>
> > better to stop slapd than svc -d. However, even if I use svc -i to stop
> > slapd, will svc -i necessarily know to send the INT signal to the
>process id
> > specified in the file slapd.pid as recommended in the OpenLDAP
> > Administrator's Guide?
>
>Of course. supervise (for slapd) is a child of svscan (so svscan knows it's
>PID) and slapd is a child of supervise so supervise knows slapd's PID.
>
>These PID files are a design failure. Think of starting slapd with PID
>2163.
>For one reason or the other slapd is terminated without removing the PID
>file. Later another process, let's say qmail-send, is started and gets PID
>2163. You didn't notice that slapd was terminated and issue a "kill `cat
>/var/run/slapd.pid`". Congratulations, you killed qmail-send but wanted
>slapd. Surprise surprise. With daemontools all daemons are child processes
>of their supervise instance and such a mess simply cannot happen.
>
> > I am not trying to argue with you, I am only trying to understand
>exactly
> > how to stop slapd because of the warning from the OpenLDAP
>Administrator's
> > Guide above: "Killing slapd by a more drastic method may cause
>information
> > loss or database corruption.".
>
>There is one problem I see about twice a year, OpenLDAP can no longer make
>updates. erasing a reinitializing the database fixes this. (btw, OpenLDAP
>1.2.11). BUT this is in no way related to killing the process. In
>production
>usage there is no reason to stop and restart slapd or to stop it at all. So
>it only gets killed on reboots, and OpenBSD machines don't boot that often
>usually ;-))
>
>This behaviour is an OpenLDAP bug. I'd file a bug report. Maybe I'll do
>that
>later today, but I'm really busy at the moment and if someone else could do
>do it it'd be nice.
>
>--
>* Henning Brauer, [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.bsws.de *
>* Roedingsmarkt 14, 20459 Hamburg, Germany *
>Unix is very simple, but it takes a genius to understand the simplicity.
>(Dennis Ritchie)
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