In an email of 5 August 2009 Howard Chu says "If your disks are working and haven't run out of space, database corruption pretty much never happens. You probably should describe the situation that leads you to believe there was a corruption. You should also list the versions of software in use."
We have been plagued over the years with instances where the database appears to have been corrupted. I'm quite happy to be proved wrong, and would be pleased, very pleased to find a solution. As I said this has happened over the years, on ancient Debian systems, through RedHat's RHEL3, RHEL4, and maybe RHEL5. I'm not sure of the last. Every three or four months the application that uses OpenLDAP stops responding. We then run 'slapcat' against the LDAP datastore and if it hangs we stop slapd, run a recovery on the BDB and start everything up again. Now and then slapd refuses to start and we have to restore from a backup (also taken by slapcat).
As I said, this has happened on many versions of OpenLDAP and on different operating systems. The latest version that I am sure it has happened on is RHEL 4.2 and OpenLDAP 2.2.13-4 (I think that is the version - I'm not able to access the servers at present so I'm going by memory).
I'd be very pleased, ecstatic even, to find a solution to this. It's been a thorn in my side for many years. What information would be useful in pointing me at a solution? I'd only add that I am not an LDAP or OpenLDAP expert - the systems only get touched when an upgrade is necessary. Any advice would be appreciated.
Cheers, hoping for a solution, or at least pointers to one.
Cliff