changes to .tdb files lost

[Pierre Filippone]

Hi,

just one or two questions regarding the .tdb files.

I made various policy changes via "pdbedit" and "net rpc rights". After 
samba (3.0.20 as PDC with ldapsam) stop and rebooting the server, all 
changes were lost. 

So I switched off the disk controller's write cache, turned off journaling 
(ext3->ext2), made the changes again and checked the results with "tdbdump 
account_policy.tdb", "pdbedit" and "net rpc rights list". All changes 
(seemed to be) in there. Then I stopped samba ( kill -15 ) and rebooted 
again. Changes lost again.

The same happened to a password change of the ldap admin user in 
secrets.tdb. The reboot was approximately one hour later, as far as I 
remember.

The only way I have found to make the changes persistent is "tdbbackup 
account_policy.tdb; mv account_policy.tdb.bak account_policy.tdb".

So here are my questions:
- In which intervals are the tdb files flushed to disk, especially 
account_policy.tdb ?
- Shouldn't the changes be synced to disk at least when samba is properly 
stopped ?
- Is it generally safe to install the tdb files on ext3 with journaling 
turned on ?

I read somewhere that Guenther Deschner made some patches to move those 
policies to LDAP but I guess they did not make it into the release. Is it 
planned to do that in the near future ? If so, I would probably wait 
before upgrading my domain controllers to the recent version. 

Would be nice, if somebody could give me a hint.

Thanks,

Pierre Filippone