Thanks again Quanah, you've been very helpful. By a very long way round I'd come to the same conclusion. My consumer only knows of the entries in the conf file. Firstly I don't understand the slapcat part, and didn't see that in the documentation, I'll go and look it up. Secondly on the provider my main db is bdb and my accesslog db is hdb. On my provider I just have a bdb database in slapd.conf.
slapcat is the supported mechanism for taking a backup of the LDAP database.slapadd is the supported way to import an LDIF file generated by slapcat into another LDAP server. Together, they form the bulk export/import capabilities of LDAP.
As for your databases, I would suggest using all the same type. back-hdb is the preferred database, back-bdb is being phased out. I would note that switching backend types will require slapcatting the main database on the master and then reloading it with slapadd after deleting the old back-bdb database.
As I said in the prior email, you can force the consumer to reload all data from the master using the -c option to slapd to reset its cookie. You may want to do that just to verify everything replicates as you need.
--Quanah -- Quanah Gibson-Mount Principal Software Engineer Zimbra, Inc -------------------- Zimbra :: the leader in open source messaging and collaboration