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1.12. Backup and Restore
Now we have ldap running just the way we want, it is time to ensure we can save all of our work and restore it as needed.
What we need is a way to backup the ldap database(s), specifically the backend (cn=config) and frontend (dc=example,dc=com). If we are going to backup those databases into, say, /export/backup, we could use slapcat as shown in the following script, called /usr/local/bin/ldapbackup:
#!/bin/bash
BACKUP_PATH=/export/backup SLAPCAT=/usr/sbin/slapcat
nice ${SLAPCAT} -n 0 > ${BACKUP_PATH}/config.ldif
nice ${SLAPCAT} -n 1 > ${BACKUP_PATH}/example.com.ldif nice ${SLAPCAT} -n 2 > ${BACKUP_PATH}/access.ldif chmod 640 ${BACKUP_PATH}/*.ldif
These files are uncompressed text files containing everything in your ldap databases including the tree layout, usernames, and every password. So, you might want to consider making /export/ backup an encrypted partition and even having the script encrypt those files as it creates them.
Ideally you should do both, but that depends on your security requirements.
Then, it is just a matter of having a cron script to run this program as often as we feel comfortable with. For many, once a day suffices. For others, more often is required. Here is an example of a cron script called /etc/ cron.d/ldapbackup that is run every night at 22:45h:
45 22 * * * root /usr/local/bin/ldapbackup
Now the files are created, they should be copied to a backup server.
Assuming we did a fresh reinstall of ldap, the restore process could be something like this:
19 http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/en/man1/ldapmodifygroup.1.html
20 http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/en/man1/ldapdeletemachine.1.html
21 http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/en/man1/ldaprenamegroup.1.html
22 http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/en/man1/ldapaddmachine.1.html
23 http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/en/man1/ldapmodifymachine.1.html
24 http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/en/man1/ldapsetprimarygroup.1.html
25 http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/en/man1/ldapdeleteuser.1.html
sudo systemctl stop slapd.service sudo mkdir /var/lib/ldap/accesslog
sudo slapadd -F /etc/ldap/slapd.d -n 0 -l /export/backup/config.ldif sudo slapadd -F /etc/ldap/slapd.d -n 1 -l /export/backup/domain.com.ldif sudo slapadd -F /etc/ldap/slapd.d -n 2 -l /export/backup/access.ldif sudo chown -R openldap:openldap /etc/ldap/slapd.d/
sudo chown -R openldap:openldap /var/lib/ldap/ sudo systemctl start slapd.service