Multiple referrals not working (ITS#1354)

[N.Cole@sc98c.demon.co.uk]

In message <5.1.0.14.0.20010926111609.01698308@127.0.0.1>, Kurt D.
Zeilenga <Kurt@OpenLDAP.org> writes
>I believe the code is working as intended.  It stops after any
>of the URLs contained within the referral return a result.
>
>Your change would cause it to chase additional URLs after
>the API had already completed the operation.

After re-reading RFC 2251, I think the problem boils down to the wording
of section 4.1.11 on Referrals: "All the URLs MUST be equally capable of
being used to progress the operation."

The people who set up our LDAP system interpreted this as meaning each
server must be equally capable of answering queries (ie. the format of
any returned entries must be the same), but need not contain identical
copies of the data. This is the same approach taken by OpenLDAP 1.2 and
Netscape/iPlanet's LDAP SDK; thus, we have several disjoint LDAP
directories, with a single referral pointing to all of them and
providing a single point-of-entry for queries.

I believe OpenLDAP 2 is expecting each server to hold exactly the same
data, so it doesn't matter which one fulfils the request, correct?
Presumably, this also limits referrals to choosing between several
servers for redundancy?

If so, it looks as though we're going to have to stay with OpenLDAP 1.2
or switch to the Netscape/iPlanet SDK. Sorry for wasting your time.

-- 
Dr. Nigel Cole