Wayne D's Blog

In an effort to aid my Linux compatriats I occasioanlly post the answers to problems I have run across. Last week we had a power failure and our LDAP server which doesn't have a UPS came back up slapd wouldn't start. LDAP logging is turned off by default because the default logging is quite verbose and creates large log files. To turn logging on add the line:
local4.* /var/log/ldap.log to /etc/syslog.conf and restart syslogd
when I did that I saw
May 31 17:39:20 server slapd[4817]: @(#) $OpenLDAP: slapd 2.2.13 (Aug 13 2006 01:27:00) $ buildcentos@build-i386:/hom
e/buildcentos/rpmbuild/BUILD/openldap-2.2.13/openldap-2.2.13/build-servers/servers/slapd
May 31 17:39:20 server slapd[4817]: bdb_initialize: Sleepycat Software: Berkeley DB 4.2.52: (December 3, 2003)
May 31 17:39:20 server slapd[4817]: bdb_initialize: Sleepycat Software: Berkeley DB 4.2.52: (December 3, 2003)
May 31 17:39:20 server slapd[4817]: bdb_db_init: Initializing BDB database

the slapd database wasn't initializing.
To fix this I had to run db_recover in /var/lib/ldap (after stopping slapd). Make sure you run db_recover as the user who owns the database otherwise you will get premission denied errors when you try to start slapd. If you run it as root you will have to change the owner from root back to the appropriate user for your system. On my Centos 4.4 system the owner is ldap.

Our new UPS comes tomorrow.