grrr...why won't this work?

[Gregg Carrier <barley@pacific.net>]

Hi all,

Thanks for the ideas on some tutorial web sites and articles. Many of them were
very helpful in clearing up some fundamental concepts for me.

Still, though, I can't actually get my OpenLdap install to do anything. Most
recently, I followed a tutorial on getting OpenLDAP set up on Linux, word for
word, but it did not produce the expected results. Here's what I did. If anyone
can tell me what I'm doing wrong, I'd really appreciate it.

After successful installation, I modified the slapd.conf as such: (straight
from the tutorial) :
#
# See slapd.conf(5) for details on configuration options.
# This file should NOT be world readable.
#
include		/etc/openldap/slapd.at.conf
include		/etc/openldap/slapd.oc.conf
schemacheck	off
#referral	ldap://root.openldap.org/

pidfile		/var/run/slapd.pid
argsfile	/var/run/slapd.args

#######################################################################
# ldbm database definitions
#######################################################################

database	ldbm
suffix		"o=Lerdorf, c=CA"
rootdn		"cn=root, o=Lerdorf, c=CA"
rootpw		secret
directory	/var/lib/ldap

So, to my present understanding, this file defines a "database" that handles
all the data input with a suffix of "o=Lerdorf, c=CA". Is that correct? The
tutorial goes on to tell me to create an ldif file that looks like this:

dn: o=Lerdorf, c=CA 
o: Lerdorf 
objectclass: organization 

dn: ou=Friends, o=Lerdorf, c=CA 
ou: Friends objectclass: organizationalunit 

dn: ou=Colleagues, o=Lerdorf, c=CA 
ou: Colleagues 
objectclass: organizationalunit 

dn: ou=Misc, o=Lerdorf, c=CA 
ou: Misc 
objectclass: organizationalunit 

dn: cn=Rasmus Lerdorf, ou=Friends, o=Lerdorf, c=CA 
cn: Rasmus Lerdorf 
sn: Lerdorf 
mail: rasmus@lerdorf.on.ca 
mail: rasmus@php.net 
objectclass: person 

dn: cn=John Doe, ou=Misc, o=Lerdorf, c=CA 
cn: John Doe 
sn: Doe 
mail: test@address.com 
objectclass: person 

OK, so all of these entries have the suffix "o=Lerdorf, c=CA", so they'll be
handled by the database defined in my slapd.conf, right? The next thing it says
to do is use ldif2ldbm. Other books I have say to use ldapadd. What is the
difference between these commands? ie why use one over the other to populate
the database? Following the tutorial, I enter the following command which seems
to execute successfully (test.ldif is the above file):

/usr/local/sbin/ldif2ldbm -i test.ldif -f /usr/local/etc/ldap/slapd.conf

Now the tutorial says to start the server this way:

slapd -f /usr/local/etc/ldap/slapd.conf 

When I run a ps -ax | grep slapd, there are 3 processes shown, so I guess it's
running. Safe assumption? Finally, the tutorial says to run a wildcard search
against the server using this command:

ldapsearch objectclass=\* 

When I run this command, I get an "No such object" error. I feel like I've been
trying to get this to work forever in a million different ways. Can anyone see a
fatal flaw here? Is there somewhere I can look to get a better picture of whats
going wrong? I must have ldap! Thanks for any help anyone can offer.

Gregg