Pat Riehecky wrote:

I am trying to troubleshoot a sync related issue (which is still in progress) so I do the sane thing and launch slapd by hand with -d 16384, but when I do this it doesn't seem to open the 636 port....

It seems like it should as I am running:

/usr/sbin/slapd -h ldap:/// ldaps:/// ldapi:/// -g openldap -u openldap -f /etc/ldap/slapd.conf -d 16384

When I do not launch it with debugging on 636 is opened.... What obvious thing am I missing?

Option flags in Unix (actually getopt(3)) only accept a single argument and arguments are parsed based on white space. If you want a list of URLs after "-h" you have to put them in quotes to protect the list from the shell's parser. This is basic Unix knowledge, nothing specific to OpenLDAP.