FAQ about Alkacon's OCEE modules

The following list of questions and answers is taken from a thread in the OpenCms mailing list from July 28th 2015.

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Q1:

What happens, when I delete an LDAP-User (or group) in my identity management system (e.g. Active Directory)? Is that user or group automatically deleted in all of my OpenCms instances (in all clusters)? If so, when does this happen?

A1:

When a user is deleted in LDAP, it stays in the OpenCms database (How should OpenCms "know" that something has been deleted in LDAP?). But there is a Scheduled job that will remove users from OpenCms that are not in LDAP anymore. This has been added to one of the last OCEE releases.

Q2:

If I have an already synchronized LDAP-User or group in my OpenCms instance and I delete this user. Is that user or group also deleted in LDAP (if I would allow an application to write to my LDAP server. A2:

No, OpenCms will not delete anything in LDAP.

Q3:

If I have an already synchronized LDAP-User in my OpenCms instance and his password is changed in LDAP. Can I still login to OpenCms with my password saved in OpenCms or does OpenCms check against LDAP, if there is a new password?

A3:

Users are synchronized when users try to log in. Therefore you will need the new password.

Q4:

Can I configure the LDAP connector to synchronize OpenCms' additional user info fields with LDAP attributes?

A4:

Yes, LDAP attributes can be mapped to user additional infos.

Q5:

When does OpenCms get updates from changes of attributes in LDAP for a user (e.g. his postal address or email address has changed). Let's say I want to generate a telephone list based users stored in the OpenCms users. How sure can I be, that those information are correct?

A5:

As said in A3) Users are synchronized when they log in. Additionally, this can be done via the Admin interface. Right now, there is no scheduled job which could do this automatically.

Q6:

The installation guide of the OCEE modules says, that the database tables should be converted to InnoDB. What happens, if I don't do that or have forgotten to do that? Can I easily run the converter script shipped with the OCEE modules anytime?

A6:

In modern OCEE versions, this is not required any more. I guess we can remove this form the documentation.

Q7:

When I understand the replication and cluster documentation correctly, I cannot have two workplace servers, each with its own database. Correct? So let's say, my workplace instance gets broken (e.g. the database server is down)? How can I get my workplace server up and running again very fast? Is there a possibility with OpenCms or do I have to create a master / master or master / slave replication on the database layer?

A7:

It is not possible to have a master/master replication. The reason is that replication only replicates ONLINE data and no OFFLINE data. Therefore a second "master" server would never have the correct OFFLINE content. Therefore it's always good to have backups of your master DB.

Q8:

Corresponding to question 7: Is it possible to configure several db server addresses in the jdbc connection string within the opencms.properties file, when I have a master / master database setup? Could this look like this: db.pool.default.jdbcUrl=jdbc:mysql://[primary host]:[port], [secondary host]:[port]/[database]?

A8:

As 7 is not possible, you cannot configure it this way.