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Ubuntu Hardy and OpenLDAP 2.4

By the looks of it Ubuntu took a giant leap of faith with OpenLDAP in Hardy Heron! They upgraded from using a reasonably stable OpenLDAP 2.3.35 in Gutsy to 2.4.7 with lots of replication problems in Hardy.

Why did they do it?! According to OpenLDAP.org the 2.3 branch is the stable release branch and 2.4 is the general release branch. OpenLDAP 2.4 seems currently be plagued by replication stability issues. Surely it makes sense to run the stable branch?!

Last night I made the mistake of upgrading our syncrepl master LDAP server from Gutsy to Hardy and now it segfaults regularly. The slave has been running Hardy for some time now without any problems, so I mistakenly thought it was safe.

I first thought the problems were Berkeley DB back-end data corruption issues - of which we have had many in the past - but repairing the databases, and even completely rebuilding them from LDIF backup has made no significant different to the (in)stability.

The question now is: Do I upgrade to 2.4.9 (from source since there doesn't seem to be any debs around yet) which by the looks of the release announcement has plenty of replication fixes, or should I try and go back to 2.3.35 from Gutsy? Decisions, decisions!

Update: I've decided to go back to OpenLDAP 2.3.35 from Gutsy. By the looks of this blog post, 2.4.9's replication is looking much better and perhaps ready for the big-time. When I get a chance, I'll give it a go in the lab this time :).

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