Tales From The Geek Side

I grew rather frustrated with slapd this weekend. I installed slapd using apt-get and then attempted and ldap bind on the admin security object that should have been created. The bind kept failing. Like an idiot I kept re-running dpkg-reconfigure slapd expecting new results. Finally I found a post to a mailing list (I’m sorry, I didn’t keep the link, I’ll try to be better about references in the future) that indicated that this is a bug in the post-install debian scripts for slapd. The workaround is to enter the rootdn and rootpasswd items in /etc/ldap/slapd.conf. An example would be something like:

rootdn cn=admin,dc=home,dc=lan
rootpasswd {SHA1}thisisnotarealpasswordhash

To generate a real password hash run slappasswd. Once I did that I could finally work with the ldap DB.

I’m really surprised that there isn’t a nice system for adding users. The adduser script is pretty specific to a flat file based approach. I’d like to see something similar to PAM but for user account maintenance. If I get ambitious enough I’d like to start a project like this. I’m not the first to think of this but I’ve not found any good implementations yet.

I’ve already written about one coding pet peave but I felt that I should share a few more. …And no, this is not an April Fool’s Day joke.

The pet peaves in this post are about needless use of constants, the bad name that early returns have earned, and copy-and-pasting code.
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