LDAP over WAN, want to do local queries

["Pete Veenbaas" <pete.veenbaas@sdrc.com>]

Greetings,

We've just merged with another company, and the "corporate" LDAP server is
located at another location. Our e-mail clients etc. are currently set up to
do lookups to this remote server. You can imagine what happens when
power/network goes down between us. I would like to set up a LDAP server of
my own that is a 'slave' of the master. I've downloaded and built that
latest version of Openldap for Solaris 2.8. What I need to know is in order
for me to create my initial database would I use 'slapcat' or 'ldapsearch',
do I need any special access to the 'master' server in order to get the data
from the remote directory? Also, is runnig ldapsearch the same as doing a
name lookup from my netscape client? If so, what would be the syntax?

thx in advance,

Pete V.