[Fedora-directory-users] problems w/ admin server, local.conf

[MJD Shop Account]

I've set up a few FDS 1.0.4 servers now and have problems every time getting certain things right with the admin server.  I run into problems using either the console or just ldif file (which I prefer, for scripting).  Here's the typical problem: when I try to set nsAdminAccessHosts, I use an ldif file.  I can see the new value is set in the operational attributes, but it doesn't always make it into /opt/fedora-ds/admin-server/config/local.conf.  The admin server logs indicate it is using the old values.

I looked at file permissions, on one server I had owner:group as ldap:root, another has root:root, a third  had ldap:ldap.  That one was not getting updated, I changed it to root:root and restarted things and that seemed to update local.conf.

Now I'm building a new server and it's not updating. I get this error in the admin server error log:
[warn] Unable to bind as LocalAdmin to populate LocalAdmin tasks into cache.

This was similar to the server I fixed, but I already have root:root permissions on that file.

I went and looked at the server that originally had root:root, and while it has been functioning OK, it too doesn't have the correctly updated values for nsAdminAccessHosts in local.conf and shows the same error in its logs from awhile back (March).  So, I tried, for a test, setting the owner:group to ldap:root.  When I did this and restarted admin server, I got this error:
[error] server reached MaxClients setting, consider raising the MaxClients setting

This on a server that should not have anyone connected to the admin server...

So I set it back to root:root and had neither error on restarting (but the attribute value is still wrong).  On all servers, there is an httpd process under ldap user id and two under root user id (one of the two of the two root processes is the parent to the other root and to the ldap process).

Sometime ago I tried to find out what triggers the re-writing of local.conf, as Richard said it was best to use the console for updating these values, where some magic makes it do that.  Richard suggested looking in the logs to see what was happening, but I found no clues there.  If anyone has one...

Maybe the permissions need to match the method; would it be different running a root script at the command prompt vs. using the java console from a windows machine and connecting as the cn=dirmgr user?

Thanks,
  MJD