Doug Goldstein wrote:

I have been attempting to setup OpenLDAP for the past couple of days with syncrepl and have been able to get it to work. The configs work resolve find with "slaptest -d config" and the master would work but the consumers would never have any data in them.

After spending some time and reconfiguring a bunch of times with the help of the guys in #ldap on Freenode. I switched by consumers from "hdb" to "bdb" and it just started to work. My master had always been "bdb".

No idea why this happens like this but the guys from #ldap told me to e-mail this info out. I was just following the guide from OpenLDAP Administrator's Guide which said to set it up with bdb on the master and hdb on the consumers.

The examples in the Admin Guide are just that - examples. The doc states that it will work with any backend type, and uses a different backend type merely to illustrate that the backend type on the consumer does not need to agree with the type on the producer.

If anyone wants any more info to track this down let me know and I'll provide it.

It sounds to me like you had already initialized the database once using bdb, then changed the slapd.conf file to use hdb, without deleting the old database files. This of course won't work since back-bdb and back-hdb have different file formats. Setting it back to bdb worked because the file format and backend agreed.