Yes,

the current situation sucks. Unfortunately, it cannot all be laid at the
feet of Ubuntu. Like you, I spent a good week in a maze of twisty
passages where nothing worked. Then, painfully, I emerged from that mess
over a few weeks to get a working system.

The core issue is that LDAP has moved on while most of the available
documentation has not. Almost all the search accessible documentation is
based on the venerable 'slapd.conf' but OpenLDAP has moved to an
embedded Db. So, like an anthropologist, one has to sift through the
docs and try to figure out what is still relevant and what no longer
works. It's a hard slog. The #openldap irc channels sometimes helps.

Then, there's Ubuntu which silently transitioned from the older system
to the newer one without really considering the consequences for the
newbies like me who were getting their first dose of LDAP in the middle
of the transition. Ubuntu doesn't have infinite resources and made the
code transition without having the documenters who could at least put up
the flags warning that 'here be monsters'. Fixing it though, requires a
good documentation writer who will take on the task of writing a really
decent chapter. In itself, that's a couple of weeks of work.
Unfortunately, the cost of figuring things out takes so much time that
there's none left to 'volunteer' to fix the docs. (And my Gnumeric
manual is ever waiting for my spare documenter cycles.) So it never gets
fixed---such goes life in the collaborosphere.

So, good luck to you with your next distribution. You now also know that
newer LDAPs are working differently from the way things used to work so
you have a leg up when installing that.

all the best,
--adrian

On Mon, 2010-02-22 at 01:36 +0000, murray wrote:
> I am sick of this.
> 
> I have spent the last 4 days upgrading, installing, uninstalling trying
> really hard to get OpenLDAP to work on Ubuntu but I am just now giving
> up.
> 
> For those who care to listen there are some reasons:
> 
> 1. I originally had it working on Edgy but when I went to test some
> stuff on Friday it was no longer working.  Plus I thought it was
> probably time for an update...
> 
> 2. The update had some moments but I eventually arrived at Karmic but
> along the way my slapd.conf wouldn't upgrade.
> 
> 3. No worries, I'll remove and install the package again.  Really really
> bad decision.
> 
> 4. The installation wouldn't work because the remove wouldn't delete the
> slapd.conf.  The remove was failing as was the install. I eventually
> deleted the slapd.conf manually so the remove and install would then
> work.  I was surprised that a new slapd.conf was never created.
> 
> 5. The configuration script asks just 3 questions when it clearly should
> be asking a whole lot more.  Nobody seems to know why it's not asking
> more but they think the documentation should be updated to reflect that
> the configuration will only ask 3 questions.  Duh!
> 
> 6. More googling and I found a step by step to getting the ldap server
> working.  Well, at least there were steps but I couldn't get them to
> work.  I needed some Berkeley database which I couldn't find anywhere,
> and I looked for other packages that utilised this bdb and tried
> installing them - I don't know if the database arrived or not but the
> LDAP script still failed with some error about the database, I think it
> was error (80) - really cool messages.  So my ldap server is like a
> beached whale without this database.... I thought that was what pre-
> requisites were for....
> 
> 7. None of the ldapadd scripts worked and now the problems are just
> adding up...
> 
> Wouldn't it be nice to have a piece of software that would load, provide
> some configuration options and then you could use a tool like
> LDAPExplorerTool2  to do the loading and searching functions.
> 
> I'm a developer and my application operates as an LDAP client - I don't
> want to learn all of the intricacies of the LDAP server in order to test
> my application.  I want just the basics operating so I can test my app
> with a couple of use cases.
> 
> I'm now completely turned off Ubuntu and will be heading off to another
> Linux derivative.
> 
> Good bye.
> Murray
>