LDAP Schema Issues

It's annoying when a basic task consumes too much of your time!

Getting an LDAP Operations Error when attempting to perform an ldapmodify on an object can be irksome. It is especially irksome if the change you are making is trivial!

Consider the following object that already exists in my LDAP Server:

dn: myattr=ABC,dc=com
objectclass: top
objectclass: mycustomobject
myattr: ABC
mytrivialattribute: Z

Now consider changing that object to the following:

dn: myattr=ABC,dc=com
objectclass: top
objectclass: mycustomobject
myattr: ABC
mytrivialattribute: Y

One might reasonable expect the LDAP modify operation to be successful bearing in mind how trivial the change is. But when you get an Operations Error being thrown back at you by a hissy-fitting Directory Server, you might start to scratch your head.

The V3.modifiedschema looked perfect as mytrivialattribute was defined with a syntax of 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.15{1024}. But looking inside DB2 revealed something a little more sinister.

I followed these steps:
db2 connect to idsldap
db2 describe table idsldap.mytrivialattribute

And what I got back was:

EID with column length 4
MYTRIVIALATTRIBUTE with column length 240
RMYTRIVIALATTRIBUTE with column length 240

That didn't look right! Somehow, mytrivialattribute was created using default parameters and the V3.modifiedschema file was manually updated at a later date. As such, the database plain refused to act upon any requests to add/modify mytrivialattributes!

Getting around the problem is simple and can be done in a number of ways. I like the brutal approach though:

• Drop the DB2 table idsldap.mytrivialattribute
• Restart the LDAP server

Describing the table now returns:

EID with column length 4
MYTRIVIALATTRIBUTE with column length 1024
MYTRIVIALATTRIBUTE_T with column length 240
RMYTRIVIALATTRIBUTE_T with column length 240

So what was going on? Well, setting a length of 1024 on the schema definition meant that the LDAP Server wanted to put the full string into the column named MYTRIVIALATTRIBUTE and to put a truncated version of the string into MYTRIVIALATTRIBUTE_T. But the _T column didn't exist so the server couldn't perform the operation.

Dropping the table and allowing the directory server to recreate it properly on startup resolved the issue.

Of course, the ramifications now begin as to why there was a mismatch in the first place, but at least the problem has been diagnosed and rectified.