Lets try this out. Ubuntu apparently has gotten it together and fixed the issue with dpkg-reconfigure. Red Hat has not. And wouldn't you guess I am using Red Hat. I looked at the Red Hat documentation and it is exactly what I am fed up with. Convert slapd.conf is the wrong way.

I have started slapd and tried running ldapmodify with the LDIF below and I get an error.

dn: olcDatabase={1}hdb,cn=config
changetype: modify
replace: olcSuffix
olcSuffix: dc=lillyrnd,dc=org

Error

[root@here ~]# ldapmodify -Y EXTERNAL -H ldapi:/// -f setup.ldif
SASL/EXTERNAL authentication started
SASL username: gidNumber=0+uidNumber=0,cn=peercred,cn=external,cn=auth
SASL SSF: 0
modifying entry "olcDatabase={1}hdb,cn=config"
ldap_modify: No such object (32)
        matched DN: cn=config