Wildcard searches on specific record types

[Joost De Cock <Joost.DeCock@astrid.be>]

Hello all,

I am running an OpenLDAP installation on a RedHat 9 box (openldap 1.8.8.7).

I have stored our internal machines (about 550) in the ldap server as 
'domainRelatedObject' . 
I wrote a script that builds our bind zone files from the data, and that works 
out just fine.

As a nice little extra, I wanted to write a webpage that would let people 
search for machines (since we also store a description etc.). When writing my 
page I noticed that I couldn't do a wildcard search.

It took me a while, but now I think that this is because in the schema 
(cosine.schema) some of the objects are not defined as having a SUBSTR 
attribute (I'm not sure about the terms I'm using here). 
It happens that I was testing with searching for a cNAMERecord. The entry in 
the scheme looks like this:

attributetype ( 0.9.2342.19200300.100.1.31 NAME 'cNAMERecord'
        EQUALITY caseIgnoreIA5Match
        SYNTAX 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.26 )

Whereas a more 'text-oriented' entry looks like this:

attributetype ( 0.9.2342.19200300.100.1.2 NAME 'textEncodedORAddress'
        EQUALITY caseIgnoreMatch
        SUBSTR caseIgnoreSubstringsMatch
        SYNTAX 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.15{256} )

And now my questions:

1) Am I right in thinking that the LDAP server is unable to do a wildcard 
search on a cname record because cNAMERecord does not have the SUBSTR stuff?

2) Let's say that I wanted that functionality anyway, could I just add the 
SUBSTR line in the schema?

3) Is proposing to change the schema the dumbest thing one could propose and 
did I just make an arse out of myself?

4) if (  3)  ) Is there another way to do a substring search on such a record 
type?

I appreciate your thoughts,

kind regards,

Joost



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