I was browsing through the mailing list archives just today and found an answer to this question myself. The userPassword:: means the information is base64 encoded. More details can be found here: http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap-software/200010/msg00062.html Checkout http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap-software/ to search the archives... Very handy! Vince