Thank you very much! I have made progress but am now in an entertaining new place (having *overwritten* my database with my overlay files). But I'm going to go RTFM and see if I can't dig myself out of that one.
 

Thank you! Sigh, 2.4.40 seems to be the latest in the Oracle repo (we are using Oracle's version of RHEL6).  It looks like there have been some good bug fixes and I'll make the case for going outside the repo. Sometime in the next couple months these two new servers will become the primary production servers and then we'll be able to do what we want with them.

The  two old servers, current production, are running 2.4.39 and 2.4.23 (and not syncing with each other!) . I've been hoping that I could sync data between at least these two new servers and the 2.4.39 server, is that possible or a foolish hope?  Again, once these new ones become primary I'll be able to keep them identical to each other, but I don't really 'own' the old ones and don't want to break them. I'm still working through the manual and the configuration settings.

One more question - still trying to understand what was done on these old servers - on these servers the config database is 0, the monitor database is 1 and the bdb database is 2. I can't slapcat the monitor database, is that normal? I get
slapcat -n 1
slapcat: database doesn't support necessary operations.

  I had a little trouble with this particular section of the manual which reads simply:

20.1. Monitor configuration via cn=config(5)
This section has yet to be written.

thanks again

Betsy