On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 09:36:01PM +0000, quanah@OpenLDAP.org wrote:

When LDAP is used as a dependency for other software during the init process (as a kerberos backend, for example), the fact that slapd exits with success prior to it being ready to accept connections can cause problems for the later services that depend on it. It would be useful to have an (optional) flag "-w <seconds>" that if provided, would have slapd wait up until <seconds> amount of time has passed for the daemon to fully initialize.

Some distros already deal with this in other ways - e.g. OpenSuSE waits until an ldapsearch on the null DN succeeds. This is done in the init.d script.

One advantage of putting explicit support into OpenLDAP for this is that it may be possible to have an option to delay starting the listners on a replication consumer until a full refresh has been done from the master (this would need a timeout option too). There are obvious deadlock issues in multi-master configs, but admins would at least have the option of using this on pure consumers.

Andrew