"Not a man to mince words. People, yes. But not words." - Terry Pratchett, Small Gods


Fixing “ldap_bind: Can’t contact LDAP server” error

Wednesday 30th November, 2005 | 7:37 pm

If, whilst trying to configure and test OpenLDAP it fails upon attempting to perform an initial query of the LDAP server along the lines of:

ldap_connect_to_host: getaddrinfo failed: Name or service not known
ldap_perror
ldap_bind: Can't contact LDAP server

the most common issue is incorrect naming with /etc/hosts . Of course, this is assuming you know you have your configuration setup right! Additional debug information during the query process can be obtained by adding “-d 255″ to your command.

Within your hosts file, it is common to have something like:

192.168.0.200 fatcontroller.homelinux fatcontroller

which would cause OpenLDAP to fail with the above error message. Instead, the full FQDN must be set, as per the LDAP configuration itself, such as:

192.168.0.200 fatcontroller.homelinux.net fatcontroller

Now, when trying to perform an initial query, it will be successful.

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