You ever have one of those days where nothing works right. Well I have been having that day for the last month and a half.

I have been working on a LDAP solution on Solaris 8 and 9. This is suppose to be a proof of concept since we have specific requirements for out passwords and the software we are using right now, Power Password, has some limitations on how it is implemented and we need to explore other options. Is that vague enough?

I started with Solaris 8 and iplanet 5.1. That didn’t work and when I contacted sun support they said

“I strongly recommend installing Solaris 9. LDAP was built in to Solaris 9 from the start, it was then backported to Solaris 8. It has been my experience that it works much better in Solaris 9.”
Brandon Neill - Sun Support

Ok, we now have to upgrade all our Soalris 8 machines to Solaris 9 just to get LDAP to work? Great! Ok so I figure we will try OpenLDAP. Got the binaries, remember this is just “proof of concept”. The binaries worked but he OpenSSL software was the wrong version… ok… Grab the source and compile.

The compile of OpenLDAP went ok. Ran into some glitches, but nothing huge. Configured the software, built the Directory Information Tree (DIT), configured the schema to accept Solaris 8, configured the nessecary operating system files. Things are looking up… the ldap user cannot log into the system. Futzed with that for a couple of days before I went on to plan D. Solaris 9 install and iplanet 5.1

This was a reinstall on a test box we had. The install was fairly normal. This was the original solaris 9 from Sun, something like 2/02. The configuration of iplanet was smooth, since I had some good docs. Contrary to the prevoius installs. It took a while to get the ldapclient to work on the Solaris 8 clients since the man page doesn’t fully explain some of the gotchas. I am still havings problems with the passord configurations… so… On to plan E.

Install the latest Solaris 9 - 12/03 ….. Tune in next week….Same Bat-Time, Same Bat-Channel…. in the continuing saga of the …. LDAP Install That Wouldn’t END….