ldifde.exe

Learned something worth remembering and passing along today at work regarding the utility ldifde that microsoft ships with both Windows Server and ADAM.

I was attempting to import an ldif file into ADAM with ldifde but the file kept getting spit back at me with “Invalid DN Syntax”. I had imported this exact same file a couple weeks ago on another identical machine, so it wasn’t making any sense. The command I was executing included a macro of sorts (#configurationNamingContext) but it wasn’t getting expanded like it should have, causing the import to fail.

After some investigation, it appears two different versions of the utility are shipped, and only the one in the C:WindowsADAM directory seems to work with the macros. I had been running the command from a different directory, so the version in system32 was getting used and causing problems.

So, if you’re trying to import and ldif file into ADAM, be sure you’re running ldifde from the correct location!