If you're going to be doing LDAP-based authentication on the server that is running the LDAP server, watch out for this bug, which has been around since at least FC5. It's still a problem as of FC10: <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=182464> The best way to avoid it so far is to have LDAP served by a machine that doesn't use LDAP. If that's not feasible for you, then you can use the soft bind described at <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=182464#c10> however that has some undesirable side effects (like user's mail might bounce with "no such user" if the LDAP server is down, instead of giving a transient lookup failure). You don't have to worry about the above bug until after you've got a working config, though. On other fronts, I prefer to edit configs manually too, but if you're just starting out you might want to start with the system-config-authentication GUI, and then edit /etc/ldap.conf for the "ou=People" and "ou=Group" stuff after that. Look at the before & after configs. Turning on various debugging options in slapd.conf can work wonders if you understand (at least in principle) what LDAP does. It can be very verbose but also very helpful. Don't forget to turn the verbose stuff off again once you solve your problem. Remember that while most LDAP clients use /etc/openldap/ldap.conf, PAM uses /etc/ldap.conf. If they're not both suitably configured, then what ldapseach is telling you has no correspondence to what PAM is seeing. As someone else mentioned, turn off the SSL stuff and just use localhost until you've got it working. In /etc/ldap.conf when you set rootbinddn, don't forget to configure /etc/ldap.secret, mode 0600. Here's an example of a full working /etc/ldap.conf from CentOS 5.4, domain changed, comments stripped, using SSL: base dc=EXAMPLE,dc=ca rootbinddn cn=manager,dc=EXAMPLE,dc=ca timelimit 120 bind_timelimit 120 idle_timelimit 3600 nss_base_passwd ou=People,dc=EXAMPLE,dc=ca?one nss_base_shadow ou=People,dc=EXAMPLE,dc=ca?one nss_base_group ou=Group,dc=EXAMPLE,dc=ca?one nss_initgroups_ignoreusers root,ldap,named,avahi,haldaemon,dbus,radvd,tomcat,radiusd,news,mailman,nscd,gdm uri ldaps://ldap1.EXAMPLE.ca ldaps://ldap2.EXAMPLE.ca/ ssl on tls_cacertfile /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle-EXAMPLE.crt pam_password md5 Devin -- One should forgive one's enemies, but not before they are hanged. - Heinrich Heine _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos