How to configure Open Directory base DN

Question

Hi,
I have been using OpenLDAP on a Synology NAS drive, but this has some serious shortcomings with Mac clients (eg. roaming profiles simply doesn't work).
So I have bought a MacMini which among other things will replace my existing LDAP server with Open Directory.
As a dry run, I enabled the Open Directory and went through the simple set up and I had a basic system up in no time.  However I have come up against an annoying issue with the base DN used by Open Directory and I hope someone will be able to help me.
My existing LDAP has a base DN that looks like this: dc=myorg, dc=local
So when users log in, they can use a username which conforms to the following format: [email protected]
The problem is that Open Directory likes to set the base DN to: dc=macservername, dc=myorg, dc=local
meaning that a fully qualified user account name now becomes: [email protected]
This seems bonkers to me.  For example, what would happen if I introduce a second Mac server into the mix and failover to it - the servername element of the DN becomes redundant or if it changes, I need to communicate with all users.
I must be missing something obvious - but there doesn't seem to be much in the way of configuration that I can see through the Server application.
So, my question is, how can I configure my base dn without the servername so that my existing username context remains the same?
Many thanks - I look forward to any responses.

Answer 1

I agree with Dal78 Apple using a base DN of servername.example.com rather than just example.com is illogical. In fact originally they did seem to use just example.com as the format but in recent years now use server.example.com as the format. When I first encountered this change it was still possible to overridge the use of servername.example.com and force it to use just example.com as the format. In more recent times I have decided to leave things the way Apple do it.
I don't know if there is an official answer as to why, but a possible guess is that you can now have multiple Open Directory servers for a single domain. This is the 'Locales' option in Server.app. It maybe that including the servername makes it possible/easier to implement this.
I also agree Strontium90 do not use a .local root domain for Open Directory. In theory there are hacks to (sort of) get this to work, but Apple engineers will typically run screaming for the woods when they encounter this.
PS. Briefly Apple also did the same illogical thing with DNS zones, whereby the zone name for a domain was servername.example.com instead of example.com this at least they have stopped doing.