Building an LDAP database "for dummies"

[Jonathan Coles <jcoles0727@rogers.com>]

Perhaps I am a bottom-up learner. The only way I have ever been able to 
learn anything about computers or programming is to play with an example 
and then read the theory that explains why it works. If I try to read 
the theory first, I grasp nothing.

In trying to learn how to create an LDAP database, my head is spinning 
with all the verbiage about trees, DN, CN, DC, slapd.conf, ldap.conf and 
so on. Is there a simple working example with an LDIF file, slapd.conf, 
and ldap.conf file that could get me started?

No matter what I try, ldapadd always complains that there is "No such 
object". The error message is useless as it doesn't tell me which 
object. And, of course, some of the objects don't exist because I'm 
trying to define them! Catch-22.

What I'm reading in the documentation and in this group tells me that 
the database has a "tree" structure that must match in the database and 
the queries. What is this tree? Is it the schema files that are included 
into slapd.conf? Or is it the DN, CN, objectClass statements in the LDIF 
file I use to create the database? Or, is something else I don't yet 
know about?

While writing this, I've discovered a Mandrake document on LDAP that 
doesn't look as horrendously complex as some of the other stuff I've 
tried to use, like TLDP's LDAP How-To. I'll give it a try.

Can anyone suggest documentation that really begins at the beginning and 
provides a very simple working example?