The case of a rather odd byte sequence (nsslapd-referral)

[Edward Z. Yang]

Hello all,

I've been using OpenLDAP to talk to Fedora DS, and my bindings
weren't working!  This was quite vexing, so I did some investigation.
I finally pinpointed the error to ldap_get_values_len() returning
a NULL pointer for nsslapd-referral, with no error code.

Sounds sort of like a bug in OpenLDAP, no?  Yes it does, but it's a bug
that's only tickled in very strange circumstances.  If you use ldapvi,
well, that links to OpenLDAP, but it ignores NULLs so that's why you
never see a nsslapd-referral in your cn=config entry.

I made a dump of the buffer that OpenLDAP was parsing values out
of (I think this was what was transmitted over the network.)

Exhibit A (byte sequence containing nsslapd-referral):

   
0<14><04><10>nsslapd-referral1<00>0<19><04><12>

Exhibit B (byte sequence containing nsslapd-localhost):

   
0,<04><11>nsslapd-localhost1<17><04><15>cats-whiskers.mit.edu0#<04><16>

As you can see, the byte sequence for nsslapd-referral appears to have
no textual data associated with it.  What's up with that?

Edward

[Edward Z. Yang]

Howard responded to the OpenLDAP list with this:

>  But it's certainly stupid for the server to attach the attribute
> to the
>  response with no values, since this is obviously NOT an attrsOnly search
>  response. Sounds like you ought to file a bug report against the Fedora
>  Directory Server. [1] 
Cheers,
Edward

[1] http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap-technical/201010/msg00123.html

[Rich Megginson]

Edward Z. Yang wrote:
>  Howard responded to the OpenLDAP list with this:
>
>    
> > But it's certainly stupid for the server to attach the attribute to the
> > response with no values, since this is obviously NOT an attrsOnly search
> > response. Sounds like you ought to file a bug report against the Fedora
> > Directory Server. [1]
> >     
>
>  Cheers,
>  Edward
>
>  [1] http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap-technical/201010/msg00123.html
>     
Ok.  Please file a bug https://bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=389
>  --
>  389 users mailing list
>  389-users(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/389-users
>

[Edward Z. Yang]

Done. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=643979

Cheers,
Edward

P.S. Boy, I'm submitting a lot of bug reports these days! Sorry
'bout that :-)

[Rich Megginson]

Edward Z. Yang wrote:
>  Done. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=643979
>
>  Cheers,
>  Edward
>
>  P.S. Boy, I'm submitting a lot of bug reports these days! Sorry
>  'bout that :-)
>     
We are grateful for your bug reports.  Keep them coming!