pena pam # /etc/init.d/slapd start * Caching service dependencies ... [ ok ] * Starting ldap-server ... [ !! ] * ERROR: slapd failed to start This by itself is not really that useful to diagnose what goes wrong. To help users from having gray hair we could run slaptest either in the beginning of start or when slapd fails to start: pena pam # slaptest /etc/openldap/slapd.conf: line 62: <rootpw> can only be set when rootdn is under suffix slaptest: bad configuration file!
as slaptest would try to create the databases this isn't a good idea as you'd end up with a permission issue (slaptest being fine, slapd still breaking) plus one would need some bash hackery to extract the used config(file|dir) from /etc/conf.d/slapd Feel free to contribute, would be fine with me :) For now marking it LATER.