ldifde Notes

Several of the steps in this process use the Microsoft ldifde utility, a relatively complex command-line utility with many options. You may want to read the documentation for ldifde that comes with AD LDS.

Here are some tips for using ldifde:

• We use ldifde to read an LDIF file (with an .ldf extension) and update AD with the objects listed in the file. LDIF files are text files and can be edited in Notepad.
• Many of the ldifde command lines shown below use the "-c" option, which takes two strings as parameters, and changes the first string to the second wherever it appears in the input. So "-c DC=X DC=mydom,DC=com" will change "DC=X" in the .ldf file to "DC=mydom,DC=com". That lets you customize the information in the .ldf file for your installation.
• You can copy the .ldf files to your AD server and run ldifde there, or you can run it on a system with Visual COBOL installed and update AD remotely.
• ldifde has to bind (log on to) AD in order to make changes to the directory. If you are not logged on as an authorized AD user, you can add "-b username domain password" to the ldifde command line.
• When we show ldifde command lines below, we use the "-s servername" option to tell ldifde the hostname of the AD server. If you're running on the AD server, or if your AD server is the domain controller for the domain that you are running in, you can leave off the "-s servername" option.
• Each time you run ldifde (with the "-j ." option), it will create an ldif.log file in the current directory. If there are errors or warnings, it will create an ldif.err file as well. If the files already exist, they will be overwritten. We recommend you rename the log file after each ldifde run (for example eg to ldif-1.log, ldif-2.log, etc) so you can send them to Micro Focus Support if you have problems. If an ldifde command fails, you can check the log and error files for more information.

A typical ldifde command will have these parts: