OpenLDAP 2.4x Syncrepl setup

["Ted Hyde (RSI)" <thyde@rndstudio.com>]

Greets - I'm trying to set up a new slave (consumer) server that would 
test against an existing (read: legacy) Samba4 AD controller for LDAP 
auth. The intent is to have the consumers as distributed HA-like setups 
in the event that VPNs or full off-site network connectivity was lost, 
users could still authenticate against the local LDAP services. (The 
application auth is really quite simple in this case, just some php 
grabbing a bunch of groups, not full AD work). In "ye olde days", I 
could do this with slapd.conf, but I'm trying to upgrade my own 
brain-software to understand OLC better, and am hitting a brick wall.
I'd really like to just have the following on each consumer server:

syncrepl        rid=1
                provider=ldap://ldap.example.com
                type=refreshOnly
                interval=00:00:00:30
                searchbase="dc=example,dc=com"
                filter="(objectClass=*)"
                attrs="*"
                scope=sub
                schemachecking=off
                bindmethod=simple
                binddn="cn=root,dc=example,dc=com"
                credentials=secret

updateref       ldap://ldap.example.com

tailed to the end of what would have been a few more lines describing 
the db for the consumer, but I've not found anywhere how to describe the 
above snippet into an ldif file. I ran this snippet (names corrected of 
course) through slaptest just to see if it could handle a partial, and 
of course it failed (missing db schema) - but if I add the db schema as 
a header, it fails because of the existing slapd.d directory. If I 
delete the slapd.d directory and place this old format into slapd.conf, 
restarting the service fails with a db import error. Yet, some of my old 
2.2 configs run fine on 2.2 but fail on 2.4
The service does run, in that I can plow out an old config, start clean, 
add sample users by hand etc, so at least it's a working server, it just 
won't join to an existing one or pull a directory from another place.

The 2.4 Admin docs say to add the old schema to the slapd.conf file (as 
I attempted above), but doesn't explore how to do it with OLC.

The goal would be to have consumer slapd's running at my off-sites that 
act in the refreshOnly mode; push up technology is NOT required. Or 
wanted, actually.

Suggestions welcome!

Thanks,
Ted.