Checking directory referrals

Referrals, or continuation references, are links from a location on an LDAP server to either a different directory server or another location on the same directory server. You can define how referrals are handled in your configuration profile: see Defining advanced LDAP server settings.

A missing or broken referral can result in fewer results being returned than expected, and can cause errors in your search.

A company spread across multiple sites is likely to have an LDAP server that contains referrals to other LDAP servers on different sites. If a referral is temporarily broken, all of the entries on the other server disappear when a synchronization takes place. To protect against such a situation, we recommend that you either set the action to abort the update, or set a maximum number of deleted entries on the threshold limits page. For more information on setting threshold limits, see Limits.

You can use the Directory Referral Checker diagnostic tool to check if there are any problems with following references.