Fw: Referral - not chased - working as designed?

[Brad T Waldorf <bwaldorf@us.ibm.com>]

Hi...

First, let me apologize if this isn't the right place to ask this question.
If it isn't, i'd greatly appreciate any suggestions on a forum to which i
can post this (and any future OpenLDAP questions).


I'm wondering what the "normal" function of a referral is supposed to be.
I (probably mistakenly) assumed that a referral is a way to specify a
server (say server B) to which your search request is forwarded (from
server A) if the search criteria isn't matched on server A.... And the data
is then searched for on server B and returned to server A.  (In slapd.conf
on server A, i have a referral value of server B.)

But all i get is the "referral (10)" result on server A...


Referral (10)
Referral: ldap://(IP address of server B):389/o=TPFstooge??sub


The documentation says ...


H.12. referral (10)
Indicates that a referral needs to be chased to complete the operation (see
Section 4.1.10).



Well, right... but isn't server A supposed to do the chasing?  Or is the
referral simply a value that's passed back to server A, and not chased?
(And you should use the "ldap" backend if you want your referalls chased?)



Sorry if this was a dumb question.  I'm probably mistakenly assuming that
referrals are automatically chased, when their only function is to simply
return a value.

Thanks for your time!