slapo-memberof(5) File Formats Manual slapo-memberof(5)
NAME
slapo-memberof - Reverse Group Membership overlay to slapd
SYNOPSIS
/opt/local/etc/openldap/slapd.conf
DESCRIPTION
The memberof overlay to slapd(8) allows automatic reverse group
membership maintenance. Any time a group entry is modified, its
members are modified as appropriate in order to keep a DN-valued "is
member of" attribute updated with the DN of the group.
Note that the dynlist overlay can also provide this functionality and
may be suitable for less demanding environments.
CONFIGURATION
The config directives that are specific to the memberof overlay must be
prefixed by memberof-, to avoid potential conflicts with directives
specific to the underlying database or to other stacked overlays.
overlay memberof
This directive adds the memberof overlay to the current
database; see slapd.conf(5) for details.
The following slapd.conf configuration options are defined for the
memberof overlay.
memberof-group-oc <group-oc>
The value <group-oc> is the name of the objectClass that
triggers the reverse group membership update. It defaults to
groupOfNames.
memberof-member-ad <member-ad>
The value <member-ad> is the name of the attribute that contains
the names of the members in the group objects; it must be DN-
valued. It defaults to member.
memberof-memberof-ad <memberof-ad>
The value <memberof-ad> is the name of the attribute that
contains the names of the groups an entry is member of; it must
be DN-valued. Its contents are automatically updated by the
overlay. It defaults to memberOf.
memberof-dn <dn>
The value <dn> contains the DN that is used as modifiersName for
internal modifications performed to update the reverse group
membership. It defaults to the rootdn of the underlying
database.
memberof-dangling {ignore, drop, error}
This option determines the behavior of the overlay when, during
a modification, it encounters dangling references. The default
is ignore, which may leave dangling references. Other options
are drop, which discards those modifications that would result
in dangling references, and error, which causes modifications
that would result in dangling references to fail.
memberof-dangling-error <error-code>
If memberof-dangling is set to error, this configuration
parameter can be used to modify the response code returned in
case of violation. It defaults to "constraint violation", but
other implementations are known to return "no such object"
instead.
memberof-refint {true|FALSE}
This option determines whether the overlay will try to preserve
referential integrity or not. If set to TRUE, when an entry
containing values of the "is member of" attribute is modified,
the corresponding groups are modified as well. Note that while
this overlay handles renames of individual groups and members,
it doesn't handle changes due to subtree renames. For
referential integrity on subtree renames the slapo-refint(5)
overlay should also be used.
memberof-addcheck {true|FALSE}
This option determines whether the overlay will check newly
added entries for membership in any existing groups. This check
is useful if populated groups are created in the directory
before the entries they reference. The situation often occurs
during replication, which may replicate entries in random order.
If set to TRUE, every Add operation will search for groups
referencing the added entry and populate its memberof attribute
with the group DNs. Note that memberof-dangling must be left on
its default setting of ignore for this option to work.
The memberof overlay may be used with any backend that provides full
read-write functionality, but it is mainly intended for use with local
storage backends. The maintenance operations it performs are internal
to the server on which the overlay is configured and are never
replicated. Consumer servers should be configured with their own
instances of the memberOf overlay if it is desired to maintain these
memberOf attributes on the consumers. Consumers must also be configured
to exclude the memberof attribute from replication. (See the exattrs
option in the consumer configuration.)
FILES
/opt/local/etc/openldap/slapd.conf
default slapd configuration file
BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY
The memberof overlay has been reworked with the 2.5 release to use a
consistent namespace as with other overlays. As a side-effect the
following cn=config parameters are deprecated and will be removed in a
future release: olcMemberOf is replaced with olcMemberOfConfig
SEE ALSO
slapo-dynlist(5), slapo-refint(5), slapd.conf(5), slapd-config(5),
slapo-memberof(5) overlay supports dynamic configuration
via back-config.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This module was written in 2005 by Pierangelo Masarati for SysNet
s.n.c.
OpenLDAP 2.6.13 2026/03/09 slapo-memberof(5)
openldap 2.6.13 - Generated Wed Mar 18 13:34:56 CDT 2026