openldap writes:
it took me 6 hours to find out that the index in the ldap database for the attribute uidNumber had not been created.
This usually means you added the 'index uidNumber' statement to slapd.conf _after_ filling the database with data. After adding an index to slapd.conf you must indeed stop slapd and run slapindex.
i stopped slapd ./slapindex -c i restarted slapd. now, pam-ldap works as expected.