LDAP Backup?

[mthomes]

My xserve G5 went down today and I cannot boot it up. I was on the phone with apple tech support and we diagnosed that it was a problem with the root user. Of course I didn’t do any backup of the user database. My bad! We tried a few things to fix that issue with single user mode, but to no dice. I can access the Server HD via a PowerBook and Target Disk Mode, but cannot boot of the server HD this way. I made a disc image (via disk utility) of the entire Server HD (1) just so I wouldn’t loose something important. What I need to know is how do I backup the LDAP database so I don’t have to recreate the users and groups and such. I have about 190+ macs I manage and I don’t want to re-add each computer and user back in.

Any ideas?

[mthomes]

I was online with Apple and just read off what I saw to him. He determined it was a root user issue. I guess I’m not sure.

Edit:
Durring bootup in verbose mode is hangs on…
Couldn’t find root user. Sleeping and trying again.
dsFindDirNodes returned -14071, count 0
dsFindDirNodes returned -14071, count 2147483646
Then it just loops…

I was planning on just making a backup of the whole Server HD 1 with disk utility. and then Re-Installing the system. I was hoping I could somehow migrate the server settings from that disc image so I don’t have to re-add everyone. Do you know how to do this?

[mkalien]

Hopefully Joel has a solution for recreating the root user 😀

But if not, did you ever make an archive using Server Admin (under Open Directory and then the Archive section)? That would obviously be the easiest way to restore your OD user & group information. Apart from that, you’d need to have a deeper understanding of openldap and password server.

I think you could get your ldap database copied to a new install by setting up the new one the exact same way (i.e. same domain and same root user password). Then, for the openldap database, you can copy the contents or /var/db/openldap/openldap-data and then run “db_recover -c -h /var/db/openldap/openldap-data” This took quite a long time for my database, but it got me up and running again. I’ve only tried this twice so I’m not sure if there are side effects to this process that I just haven’t seen yet.

Ok, so even if that worked you wouldn’t have any passwords for your users (assuming you were using OD Passwords and not crypt). I have no idea how to backup the password server database without the use of the “mkpassdb -dump” command. I noticed that the man page for mkpassdb has “mkpassdb -backupdb path” under the synopsis but there’s no details on whether “path” means path to the database you want to backup or path to the location of where to save the backup.

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