Are these custom clients? What prevents them from using the
telephoneNumber attribute? At the least, it sounds like the clients you
have querying your service are horribly broken.
Clients: Cell phones, Outlook, Thunderbird, ScheduleWorld, Evolution,
KMail, OS/X mail, etc..
Take a cell phone - the numbers it pushes to an LDAP server are often not
compliant with SYNTAX 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.50{32}.
I would have to write some code to translate arbitrary UTF-8 TEL strings
into ...121.1.50 - which is guaranteed to not work perfectly (then back
again into UTF-8 -lossless, which is guaranteed not to work perfectly).
If I don't do perfect translation to/from 121.1.50 (which is impossible)
all LDAP clients (Thunderbird, OS/X mail, Outlook, etc..) will get the
incorrectly translated number, and eventually push that back to the phone.
Also, a good percentage of raw phone numbers entered in
Outlook/Thunderbird/OSX mail, etc.. that I see from folks around the
globe do not conform to ...121.1.50. It's not just a cell phone problem,
but any non-LDAP software that wants to stay in sync with the LDAP server.
I don't want to disable schema checking. Though, that seems like the only
realistic option as modifying schema_prep.c (thank Frank) sounds like a
maintenance problem.
Have I missed anything? I hope so because if not I will have to move to
another LDAP server.