marty@maui.co.uk wrote:

Full_Name: Marty Lee Version: 2.4.39 OS: Solaris 10 / 11 URL: ftp://ftp.openldap.org/incoming/ Submission from: (NULL) (81.149.129.52)

With a global overlay set, slapd is crashing in servers/slapd/backover.c at line 703, with a SEGV.

Seems someone else has seen the same issue and put an asset in there:

Maybe I've missed something that says global overlays are bad; but if so, then I'd expect slapd to complain about it in the messages....

Global overlays are generally a bad idea. They were not part of the original overlay design, they were added ad hoc and require explicit support in the overlay code. Most overlays have not been written to support global use. In fact only two overlays even mention support for global use in their manpage; you should assume none of the others do.