This error message is commonly found when using the OpenLDAP ldapsearch, ldapmodify, ldapadd or other ldap command line utilities against non-OpenLDAP servers such as Sun’s SunONE/iPlanet, IBM’s Tivoli, or Novell directory servers. This tech-recipe explains the error and describes how to solve it.
OpenLDAP uses SASL (Simple Authentication and Security Layer) by default, while most other LDAP servers do not.
If you are not interested in enabling SASL on the target LDAP server, you can use simple authentication by adding the -x command line option to the ldap commands.
