Lotus Sametime and LDAP – a lesson learnt in testing

Lesson learnt this morning…

Don’t try, even in very small scale test mode, to set Sametime to use itself as an LDAP server – it doesn’t work.

You get errors such as this:
19/06/2008 12:29:34   Error attempting to access the Directory *[127.0.0.1]:389 (no available alternatives),  error is LDAP Server is NOT available.

It appears that the issue is that the LDAP service and the Sametime-configured DA.NSF cause a loop.  This technote gives more detail:


If you are running the LDAP task and the “Directory assistance database name” field is pointing to the directory on the same Domino server where Sametime resides, Directory Assistance is not needed, and causes problems.


Sametime should not, under any circumstances (in the stconfig.nsf or da.nsf), point to LDAP on the local server. When this is done, an infinite loop occurs through da.nsf because LDAP does a lookup against da.nsf when web authentication occurs.

So if you want to use Sametime and LDAP for test (e.g. to test the migration from Domino Directory to LDAP authentication), you will need two servers as a minimum.

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