System Administration Guide: Naming and Directory Services (DNS, NIS, and LDAP)

Monitoring LDAP Client Status

The following sections show various commands to help determine the state of the LDAP client environment. Also see the man pages for additional information about the options that can be used.

For an overview of the Service Management Facility, refer to Chapter 18, Managing Services (Overview), in System Administration Guide: Basic Administration. Also refer to the svcadm(1M) and svcs(1) man pages for more details.

Verifying ldap_cachemgr Is Running

The ldap_cachemgr daemon must be running and functioning correctly at all times. Otherwise, the system doesn't work. When you start the LDAP client, the client starts ldap_cachemgr daemon automatically. So, if the ldap_cachemgr is not running, the LDAP client will be disabled. Following are two methods for determining if the LDAP client is online.

For more information about the ldap_cachemgr daemon, see the ldap_cachemgr(1M) man page.

Checking the Current Profile Information

Become superuser or assume an equivalent role, and run ldapclient with the list option.


# ldapclient list
NS_LDAP_FILE_VERSION= 2.0
NS_LDAP_BINDDN= cn=proxyagent,ou=profile,dc=west,dc=example,dc=com
NS_LDAP_BINDPASSWD= {NS1}4a3788e8c053424f
NS_LDAP_SERVERS= 192.168.0.1, 192.168.0.10
NS_LDAP_SEARCH_BASEDN= dc=west,dc=example,dc=com
NS_LDAP_AUTH= simple
NS_LDAP_SEARCH_REF= TRUE
NS_LDAP_SEARCH_SCOPE= one
NS_LDAP_SEARCH_TIME= 30
NS_LDAP_SERVER_PREF= 192.168.0.1
NS_LDAP_PROFILE= pit1
NS_LDAP_CREDENTIAL_LEVEL= proxy
NS_LDAP_SERVICE_SEARCH_DESC= passwd:ou=people,?sub
NS_LDAP_SERVICE_SEARCH_DESC= group:ou=group,dc=west,dc=example,dc=com?one
NS_LDAP_BIND_TIME= 5

Currently the /var/ldap files are in ASCII format. Because the files could change to binary at some time, concatenating the files would cause problems. ldapclient list is the supported method for accessing this information. See the ldapclient(1M) man page for more information.

Verifying Basic Client-Server Communication

The best way to show that your client is talking to the LDAP server is with the ldaplist command. Using ldaplist with no arguments dumps all the containers on the server. This works as long as the containers exist, and do not have to be populated. See the ldaplist(1) man page for more information.

If the first step works, you can try ldaplist passwd username or ldaplist hosts hostname but if they contain lots of data you might want to pick a less populated service, or pipe them to head or more.

Checking Server Data From a Non-Client Machine

Most of the commands in the previous sections assume you already have created an LDAP client. If you have not created a client and want to check the data on the server, use the ldapsearch command. The following example lists all of the containers.


# ldapsearch -h server1 -b "dc=west,dc=example,dc=com" -s one "objectclass=*"

In Solaris 9 and earlier releases, the ldapsearch command, by default, produced output in a nonstandard textual representation. The default output for ldapsearch in later Solaris releases is the industry standardized LDIF format that is defined by RFC-2849. All versions of ldapsearch can output LDIF format using the -L option.