LDAP Troubleshooting

Drake Emko

Iain Moffat

LDAP stops responding

Diagnosing the problem

If LDAP doesn't work, services that depend on it also will show problems. GatorMail is one such service - users will complain that they can't log in, and that they get a "Cannot retrieve required user information" error.

To check if the service is responding correctly:

Log onto the OpenLDAP node. The LDAP service resolves to dir.ufl.edu and ldap.ufl.edu.
```
ldapsearch -h dir.ufl.edu -uid=<your_gatorlink_id>
              
```
Make sure you choose a gatorlink ID that doesn't have the privacy flag set.
If the service is functioning normally, you will see output containing all the LDAP information for that ID, followed by a section that looks something like this:
```
# search result
search: 2
result: 0 Success

# numResponses: 2
# numEntries: 1
	      
```
If the service is not functioning properly, you will sometimes see the above section that declares "Success", but you won't see any actual LDAP output for the uid.

Restarting LDAP

As root:

/tmp/stop_slapd

Then use:

ps -fade | grep slapd

make sure there aren't any slapd processes running. Then:

/etc/openldap/restart_slapd

Logging stops

If you notice that /var/log/slapd.log has stopped logging, it is likely that syslogd needs to be restarted (this condition will affect all logging, not just slapd). As root:

startsrc -s syslogd