My Linux computer was working great, then it flipped out and I could do nothing but reset. When it rebooted, LDAP refused to start. The error in the log says, "unable to join the environment" and "bdb_db_open: dbenv_open failed: Resource temporarily unavailable (11)".

Can anyone tell me what is wrong and how I can fix it and get my LDAP server back up?

Most likely, your BDB needs to be recovered. This is like "fsck" for filesystems.

Stop LDAP if it's up, and run "db_recover -h <wherever-your-bdb-is>". It will probably take a long time. After it's done:

If it doesn't complain, run "db_archive -d -h <wherever-your-bdb-is>". This will make recovery quicker for the next time, and should be run periodically as part of general maintanence.

If it DOES complain, try "db_recover -c -h <wherever-your-bdb-is>". This will take a REALLY long time but it might save your bacon.

Your db_* tools might be called something like db4.4_* instead - look around for them.

Thanks for the reply. I did db_recover -c -h /var/lib/ldap but I am still getting the same error. Actually after I do db_recover, it screws up the permissions and when I try to start ldap the log says permission denied to __db.001, I fix the permissions and try starting ldap again, then I am back to the unable to join environment error.

Does db_recover produce any output at all?

Yeah. db_recover -c -h /var/lib/ldap -v
db_recover: unable to join the environment
db_recover: Finding last valid log LSN: file: 1 offset 681621
db_recover: Recovery starting from [1][28]
db_recover: Recovery complete at Sat Apr 22 21:14:46 2006
db_recover: Maximum transaction ID 8000019b Recovery checkpoint [1][681621]

That "unable to join the environment" is your problem. db_recover can't open the DB either. All I could dig up on that error was dead ends, especially on Red Hat 9.

Alright. Can you tell me how I can start over :-(? What do I need to delete to get LDAP start again with an empty directory?

Ok, so I did not feel like rebuilding my directory and was quite unmotivated about it, as starting from scratch can do to you. Then tonight I got motivated enough that I decided to backup the db files, uninstall the openldap-server RPM, reinstall it, and start the server. Everything worked fine at that point, but obviously bare directory. So I copied my configs back in and restarted the server, still working, ok, what would happen if I copied the db files back to the directory. I restarted it, uh ok it is running, so if I do an LDAP search will it find the entries, in fact it did. I was so excited to find I was back in business with no data loss :-). But I think from now on, I will keep a backup ;-).