While trying to get ldap torture back in shape, I had to learn again how to get slapd
up and running with a reasonable configs. Here's a few things I had long forgotten and I have learned this morning:
slapd.conf
is relevant. Don't be naive, even though the config looks like a normal key value store, some keys can be repeated multiple times (like backend, or database), and can only appear before / after other statements.slapd
. Some of it is because the setup is just different, some of it because I probably had a few errors to being with, some of it is because a few statements moved around or are no longer valid. See the changes I had to make.Recent versions of slapd
support having configs in the database itself, or at least represented in ldiff format and within the tree. Many distros ship slapd
with the new format. To convert from the old format to the new one, you can use:
slapd -f slapd.conf -F /etc/ldap/slapd.d
I had long forgotten how quiet slapd
can be, even when things go wrong. Looking in /var/log/syslog
might often not be enough. In facts, my database was invalid, configs had error, and there was very little indication of the fact that when I started slapd, it was sitting there idle because it couldn't really start. To debug errors, I ended up running it with:
slapd -d Any -f slapd.conf
slapd
will not create the initial database by itself. To do so, I had to use:
/usr/sbin/slapcat -f slapd.conf < base.ldiff
with base.ldiff
being something like this.
Even if you set no password, ldapsearch
with SASL authentication will likely ask you. It's easy to fix, though: just pass the -x
parameter to go back to simple authentication, like with:
ldapsearch -x -H "ldap://127.0.0.1:9009/" -b dc=test,dc=it
Note that I had slapd run on a non standard port for experimentation purposes.
Let's say you use -h
instead of -H
for ldapsearch because your memory is flaky, but you specify the parameter like -H
would expect:
ldapsearch -x -h "ldap://127.0.0.1:9009/" -b dc=test,dc=it
The command will silently fail. Eg, it will accept -h
as "valid" parameter, but still report "unable to connect". Really, -h
takes a simple hostname, like 127.0.0.1
, but will not fail in a case like above. Took me a few minutes to realize the mistake.
Let's see what the next roadblocks will be ...