Upgrade from 4.5.6 to 5.0.1 (or 5.0.2) RHEL5

[dagar]

I am using the NE. Over a year ago I made the switch from rhel4 32bit to 64bit. It was the same box, but I had new HDs. So I did a zmbackup to a NFS share, powerdown and swap out HDs, power back on with rhel4 x86_46 with identical network config and then tried to do a restore and that was a nightmare. More than once I had to powerdown and go back to the old HDs.
I sure hope that the disaster recovery is MUCH better in 5.x than it is in 4.x.
I think that you gave me some good wiki entries, which I will print out and have ready for me on Sat. If anything goes wrong I will call!!!!

I was also told that zimbra is not supported on a rhel5 xen guest. I was hoping to do that so if I have any hardware problems it is much easier to recover. Any idea on when that will be supported? I know you are trying to support so many Linux variants and MacOSX that this would be just 1 more thing to add to it.
Let me know
Derek

[Rich Graves]

Xen is known to lack support for mutexes that are *critical* for reliable openldap operation. RHEL4 running on Xen 3.0.4 (from-source or Debian host) is definitely broken.

It is possible that the issue is fixed somehow in 64-bit RHEL 5.1, but I don't want to be the first one to try it in production, and haven't even had time to try it in test. Search for a "virtualisation" thread here for pointers.

[dagar]

What is the version of OpenLDAP and Berkely db used in the 5.x version of Zimbra? I opened a case with Red Hat to see if there still is an issue with the mutexes and running in a xen guest. Hopefully they can resolve any issues.

[quanah]

OpenLDAP 2.3.40 and Sleepycat 4.2.52

[dagar]

I had opened a red hat case on this and they had posted that the latest version of openldap and Berkely db/sleepycat have been patched.

Copied from support email:
...
Thanks for your patience with this issue.

As per the update from Engineering this has been resolved in the xen version that we ship with RHEL. Both guest version of RHEL4 and RHEL5 has a fix for this.

I have also run some instances of openldap with bdb in paravirtualized RHEL4 and RHEL5 and had no issues with them.

If you face any problems, please open new tickets. I am changing the status of this ticket to "Pending Closure" for now.
...

[Rich Graves]

Patched how? Please press for more details. (I can't because academic licenses don't get that level of support.)

If it requires complementary kernel *and* bdb *and* openldap patches, then Zimbra's builds of bdb and openldap aren't going to have them.

[Rich Graves]

(Yes Zimbra is a third-party product, but RedHat resells it through RHX, so hopefully someone can bug them about it.)

[phoenix]

What was the RH bug number for this problem?

[dagar]

I don't know yet, but I posted an update to my case to find that out. I know that since Zimbra is a RHX partner it will be in both of their best interests to find out this info. I just renewed my Zimbra support with a RHEL subscription bundle

[quanah]

Originally Posted by Rich Graves

If it requires complementary kernel *and* bdb *and* openldap patches, then Zimbra's builds of bdb and openldap aren't going to have them.

Exactly. I've not seen a single RH submitted patch for this issue come in to the OpenLDAP Foundation, so it must be something they have chosen not to share.

--Quanah