[KLUG Members] OpenLDAP failover questions

[adam bultman]

OK fellas, I'm hoping that there's an LDAP person here that's a bit 
familiar with openldap in a "high availability' type stup here.

I have two ldap servers.  Both servers are pretty much identical, and 
are going to be put into production sometime in the very near future. 
However, instead of the usual master/slave setup, it is going to be 
running with heartbeat, so that in the event of a failure in the master, 
the slave's heartbeat process will notice, restart slapd with a "master" 
type configuration file, and then assume the IP address and everything 
will hopefully be normal.

Here's my issue. In the event of a failover, I'll have a master (down) 
and a slave.  The slave becomes the master, and the master goes down for 
a while.  When it comes back up, it becomes the slave.  Is there any 
assurance  that the master server will notice that the slave is up, and 
start replicating the changes to it?  Or will i have to log into the new 
master and kick off a special slurpd process which will then read the 
replog and start updating the slave?   Do I run the risk of having a 
master with one dataset and a slave with another dataset in the event of 
a failover, and if so, how big is that risk?  I'd like to avoid manually 
copying files or having automated file copies in the event of failures; 
I just want them to work and for me to kick off the process and not 
think about it until it's time to fix a busted server.

I've been googling and reading man pages but haven't gotten my questions 
answered yet. bummer.

Adam