Well - I have managed to get 2.4.23 working starting as root and using the -g and -u options to actually run as user ldap. 2.4.24 was NOT able to do that giving the error above. Since I have a working version now I am pretty happy. However the error that 2.4.24 gives seems bizarre. I can do more testing on this if you want further info; perhaps slapd is unable to find the user ldap?
Use slapd -d -1 -u ldap -g ldapon OpenLDAP 2.4.24, and see what it reports. It should certainly work with 2.4.24 as well as 2.4.23.
--Quanah -- Quanah Gibson-Mount Sr. Member of Technical Staff Zimbra, Inc A Division of VMware, Inc. -------------------- Zimbra :: the leader in open source messaging and collaboration