In a project, i have to restart openldap's slapd from a daemon.
This failed, with no reason, no log entry at all.
After some debugging i found out that slapd requires a terminal ... just to vanish again a bit later into the daemon mode.
Ok, screen does the job:
screen -D -m /etc/init.d/ldap start
If Typo3 ever tells you: "You are not allowed to create directories" never trust your boss, do not search permission problems in the underlaying OS. Go and activate the filesystem checkboxes for the specific user in the user manager.
This is especially true if you are using a LDAP backend.
If you experience performance problems in openldap, especially with a back-sql backend, try to deactivate the debugging in openldap.
In particular the debugging mode 128 (access control list processing) needs a lot performance.