Saint Aardvark's Journal: Stupid, uninformative errors

Spent half the day trying to figure out why a Sun Directory Server had suddenly lost its ability to replicate over SSL. The logs said:

[21/Nov/2006:00:01:00 -0800] - INFORMATION - NSMMReplicationPlugin - conn=-1 op=-1 msgId=-1 - Replication over SSL FAILED as SSL is not enabled. Check that the attribute nsslapd-security in cn=config is on.
[21/Nov/2006:00:01:00 -0800] - ERROR<8318> - Repl. Transport - conn=-1 op=-1 msgId=-1 - [S] Bind failed with response: SSL configuration error (808).
[21/Nov/2006:00:01:00 -0800] - ERROR<8221> - Incremental Protocol - conn=-1 op=-1 msgId=-1 - Failed and requires administrator action [ldap.example.com:636]
[21/Nov/2006:00:01:00 -0800] - ERROR<8221> - Incremental Protocol - conn=-1 op=-1 msgId=-1 - Failed and requires administrator action [ldap.example.com:636]

Google turned up nada. In the end, it turned out that the last time the directory server had been started, the security token had not been provided. Restarted the server, typed in the token on standard input, and replication works again.

Yes, this is a job for expect -- but this approach has failed for coworkers in the past. I'll have to look into it.