On 14/09/2010 11:33, clem.oudot@gmail.com wrote:

...

Full_Name: Clement OUDOT Version: 2.4.23 OS: GNU/Linux URL: ftp://ftp.openldap.org/incoming/ Submission from: (NULL) (83.145.72.122)

Hi,

I am using OpenLDAP 2.4.23 compiled with --enable-overlays (RPMs from http://www.ltb-project.org). Overlays are not compiled as modules.

Overlay sssvlv is compiled, but not activated in configuration

But:

• SSS and VLV controls are displayed in RootDSE
• SSS control is taken into account if present in an LDAP search

operation

For example, a search with SSS control on cn (which has no ordering rule) gives: result: 18 Inappropriate matching text: serverSort control: No ordering rule

The error would be normal if overlay has been activated, but I think control should be ignored if overlay is not active.

I hit this exact same issue just last week - it seems that when the overlay is compiled in, the SSS control is displayed in the rootDSE.

In my case, this caused a client to attempt to use the control, then fail with a similar message as above. Without the overlay compiled in, the client just doesn't use the control, and the client's operation suceeded.

My point is that I agree this probably shouldn't be activated by default, or at the very least a clear warning added in the documentation.

This behavior is common to all overlays that register a general feature, like controls, extended ops or even just a bit of custom schema: the registration is done when the module is loaded (or at startup, if the module is statically built into slapd). As a consequence, the feature is advertised because slapd knows about it, but since it is not explicitly configured, does not know how to handle it.

In the end, slapd's behavior is correct: it recognizes the feature, it recognizes requests for the feature, but does not know how to handle them, thus returns an appropriate error. This looks pretty consistent with RFC4511 and specifications of each feature, although I understand it could be disappointing.

Perhaps we could modify this behavior so that the module initialization does nothing or so, and only the first instantiation of the feature causes the real initialization. This was discussed in the past, and I recall it created trouble when part of the initialization was needed earlier (e.g. registering schema items that need to be used later in the configuration or so; a clear case was back-monitor, which registers schema items that are needed by other backends when registering custom monitoring; if back-monitor startup didn't occur early enough, one had to instantiate it before any database that wanted to register custom monitoring).

In conclusion: the current behavior is consistent; on a case by case basis, feature instantiation could perhaps be deferred as much as possible, unless this conflicts with other features.

p.