Educating yourself does not mean that you were stupid in the first place; it means that you are intelligent enough to know that there is plenty left to 'learn'. -Melanie Joy

Thursday 3 December 2015

ldapmodify failed with error "dn: attribute type undefined"

December 03, 2015 Posted by Dinesh ,
I was facing this strange error "dn: attribute type undefined" while I am trying to delete attributes from the LDAP. My ldif file has two attributes to be deleted.

cat /tmp/modifyattr.ldif

dn: fsFgId=Child2, fsFgId=Child1, fsClsId=Root
changetype: modify
delete: fsListeningHost

dn: fsFgId=Child2, fsFgId=Child1, fsClsId=Root
changetype: modify
delete: fsPort


When ldapmodify command is executed with the above ldif file it says "Undefined attribute type".

modifying entry "fsFgId=Child2, fsFgId=Child1, fsClsId=Root"
modify complete
ldapmodify: Undefined attribute type (17)
additional info: dn: attribute type undefined

I googled for this error, every where I found suggestion to add extra blank line before dn. It didn't work for me. After a lot of research and experiments I found that I was adding extra space along with the blank line !!! Because I was creating this file using bash script, I didnt notice that extra space.

Finally it worked like charm.