In attempt to learn THE directory service called LDAP, I tried to setup OpenLDAP in Scientific Linux. The install went all right and slapd can be immediately started without much problem. Except that the config is one big mystery and there’s not even a rootpw defined by default. Being a complete newbie in LDAP thingy, I decided to build configuration and all from zero.

…except that it’s not actually trivial. Most examples/tutorials are for OpenLDAP prior to 2.4 which still uses slapd.conf which was obsoleted in favor of configuration in meta-format using LDAP’s ldif. Instead of one nice config, we have directories called cn=config etc inside slapd.d. Someone must’ve been into Linux too much (xxx.d – Linux users sure love “modularizing” their configs).

Anyway, the example in manual page of slapd-config doesn’t even work because the include syntax was wrong (should be file:///etc/… instead of /etc/…) and even after fixing that there still an error:

[root@charlotte openldap]# slapadd -F /etc/openldap/slapd.d -n 0 -l initman.ldif
str2entry: invalid value for attributeType olcSuffix #0 (syntax 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.12)
slapadd: could not parse entry (line=626)
_#################### 100.00% eta   none elapsed            none fast!
Closing DB...
[root@charlotte openldap]# slaptest
slaptest: bad configuration file!

The example from the guide also gives exact same error.

In short, I kind of given up and tried to follow the “Quick Start” from the very same guide. Instead of using slapd.d format, it still uses slapd.conf format despite it being a guide for 2.4. Seems like following a pattern, the config example also spit out error:

[root@charlotte openldap]# vi slapd.conf
[root@charlotte openldap]# slaptest
/etc/openldap/slapd.conf: line 2:  invalid DN 21 (Invalid syntax)
slaptest: bad configuration file!

So much for an example. Few attempts later at both methods, I gave up and wrote this post.