net rpc vampire performance

[Donald W Watson]

I am working with Jim McDonough on the IBM Samba team, and have been
looking into performance enhancements for net rpc vampire.  While vampire
to a tdbsam backend runs reasonably quickly, vampire to an ldapsam backend
with a large number of users could be speeded up.  I have designed and
written some preliminary code which creates ldif files and runs
ldapadd/ldapmodify against them.  It runs much faster than the original
code, but has raised the following issues on which I would like community
input:

1. I used smbldap-populate for the initial database population. It might be
nice to be independent of the smbldap tools, but performing the initial
database population in the Samba code will involve some substantial string
manipulation with all its attendant wide character ramifications.  This is
a result of needing to parse the character strings returned by the
lp_ldap_*_suffix functions to get reasonable values for some of the ldap
object attributes (for example: o: and ou:).  The smbldap-populate script
is written in perl, so this is easy for them.  Samba's util_str.c module
might need some additional string functions.

2. Should the code simply produce an ldif file(s) against which the user
can run ldapadd/ldapmodify, or should it produce temporary ldif files, run
ldapadd and ldapmodify, and then delete the temporary files?  The later
case mimics more accurately the way the current code works.

3. How should the user activate the new code from the command line?
Currently I'm using an additional option:  "net rpc vampire ldif -S
<domain>".

Sincerely,    Don Watson
Linux Technology and Solutions; Beaverton, OR
503-578-4861/TL: 775-4861; dwatson at us.ibm.com