"You already know that replicated directories are a
fundamental requirement for delivering a resilient enterprise
deployment, but which one to choose?
"You'll probably be thinking in terms of a master server and
some number of slave servers. Stop, this is old terminology now and
in 2.4 they are now called provider and consumer. Let me
explain.
"In older releases of OpenLDAP (2.3) a master accepted directory
updates from other clients, and a slave only accepted updates from
a (single) master. The replication structure was rigidly defined
and any particular database could only fulfill a single role,
either master or slave:"