"wrong attributetype" when using ldapadd

Question

When attempting to load the following configuration

dn: olcDatabase={1}hdb,cn=config
changetype: modify
add: olcMirrorMode 
olcMirrorMode: TRUE

I get the following error:

root@box:~# ldapadd -Y EXTERNAL -H ldapi:/// -f mirrormode.ldif 
SASL/EXTERNAL authentication started
SASL username: gidNumber=0+uidNumber=0,cn=peercred,cn=external,cn=auth
SASL SSF: 0
ldapadd: wrong attributeType at line 4, entry "olcDatabase={1}hdb,cn=config"

It looks fine to me -- what's the problem?

score 19 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 27 '14 at 12:22

19

The problem turned out to be a trailing space on on this line:

add: olcMirrorMode

Grrr!

answered Feb 27 '14 at 12:22

seb

391

How did you find out? – Boy Baukema May 23 '14 at 06:01
Good question! I don't think any diagnostic tools helped - I think I just noticed as I was examining the config, weeping. Sorry I can't be more specific, it was a while ago now. – seb Jun 02 '14 at 09:20
1

Not sure if you use vim, but: https://github.com/itspriddle/vim-stripper – Paul Stengel Jan 22 '16 at 15:02
2

Thanks @seb ! @RelaXNow : to see if you have any (export GREP_COLOR='0;41'; grep --col -Enm5 '\s+$' your.ldif) to remove: sed -ri 's,\s+$,,g' your.ldif – Boop Feb 24 '17 at 18:52
2

A space in a line, which should be empty, is also fun. – ceving Feb 19 '19 at 16:01
2

@Boop: no need for the subshell or the export (just remove the semicolon): GREP_COLOR='0;41' grep --col -Enm5 '\s+$' your.ldif – Dennis Williamson Jul 25 '19 at 17:50
For a plain text language, LDIF is surprisingly sensitive to whitespace issues. – DustWolf Mar 06 '24 at 14:16

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 22 '22 at 11:13

I've stepped on the same rake today, but there were no trailing spaces, there were another hidden joke.

My colleague have sent me a sample LDIF with a question, I tried to reproduce the problem he encountered by copying the text from the colleague's message. I've been struggling to understand what is wrong for an hour, before I understood that there was Unicode symbol U+00A0 (0xC2 0xA0) instead of ASCII SPACE (0x20).

Thanks to vim and its syntax highlighting, vim was desperately trying to give me a clue:

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 09 '22 at 00:12

In my case I missed to put a hyphen between multiple updates.

Wrong:

dn: cn=John Doe,ou=user,dc=example,dc=com
changetype: modify
add: disabled
disabled: 0
add: activity
activity: INACTIVE
ldapmodify: wrong attributeType at line 5, entry "cn=John Doe,ou=user,dc=example,dc=com"

Correct:

dn: cn=John Doe,ou=user,dc=example,dc=com
changetype: modify
add: disabled
disabled: 0
-
add: activity
activity: INACTIVE

"wrong attributetype" when using ldapadd

3 Answers3

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