One of the things we are very proud of with the OpenDS project, is its ease of use, and this is very well illustrated with the QuickSetup installer.

Based on our past experience, we’ve made sure that OpenDS server has no use of absolute paths.

For the developer, this is really handy. It allows you to move an installed OpenDS instance from one directory to another very easily: you just stop the server, move the instance to a larger or faster disk, and restart it.

Similarly, you can also create a new instance of the server by copying the installed server to a new location (instead of moving it). If you do this to run both instance, don’t forget to edit the dse.ldif file to change the port numbers (LDAP, LDAPS and Admin), and possibly the replication configuration if replication was enabled on the initial server.

In our daily tests with OpenDS, we use this capability a lot, especially when we run benchmarks. After having installed, configured and tuned the OpenDS instance, we make a copy that we start and run the tests against. When finished, we capture the desired results, and delete the instance. And we repeat the steps, making sure we have consistent results.

As all of our tests are done with multi-master replication enabled, we do tests with 2 instances on separated machines. So, we need to restore 2 instances to their initial state to reproduce a test. The ability to do “cp -r RefInstance/ TestInstance/” on both machine, is definitely a key advantage for us.

Note that if you install OpenDS 1.2 on OpenSolaris from the IPS package repository, there is a separation between the installation path (where the binaries and default configuration is stored) and the instance path (where the data and live configuration is stored). The instance path is stored in a file named instance.loc which is under /etc/opends/. Moving instances can be done, as long as the instance.loc file gets updated (manually).

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