https://bugs.openldap.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10383
--- Comment #1 from Nadezhda Ivanova nivanova@symas.com --- Hi David, This issue has nothing to do with the order of attributes in the entry. It seems to be caused by meta's organization of target connections. They are usually connected to the client connection, and re not currently being reset when the target's URI is modified, leaving then in an invalid state. This causes all kinds of issues, from simple failures to assertion failures in some cases so it is not advised.
Fixing this is not trivial and will take a while, and unfortunately I have not been able to find a work-around. Closing the client connection should work in theory, but in my case it causes various other problems, from a lack of response to an assertion failure. It seems until this issue is fixed, the only reliable way to change the target's URI would require restarting slapd.