Since you are having issues with eDirectory, you are quite lucky, since you can use DSTrace with the LDAP option on to see what is going on, from the eDirectory server view.
Once you know what is being asked, and what the server is responding you can effectively troubleshoot the issue.
Basic eDirectory schema is complaint with LDAP and any standard LDAP schema should work for the most part. To get some specific features you might need some additional support, but that does not sound like your issue.
If you have access to the 10.10.1.27 box, try and look at it via http://10.10.1.27:8008 (or possibly port 8010, or 8028 depending if you are running eDirectory on Netware, Windows or a Unix variant respectively). This should redirect you to an https:// connection one port number higher (8009, 8010, or 8030 (ya 2 not 1)). Look for iMonitor or Dstrace, and then clear all the other flags, and enable the LDAP flag. Then the Dstrace Live icon will refresh on each click with the latest transactions.
Now as to your issue of:
there's almost no hierarchy. (I can
set a base DN and view a particular
object... but if I set the real base
DN... I can only see it... and no
children.)
I would suspect this issue is more about not doing the right kind of query. Sounds like you are doing Entry not Subtree queries. This will be very obvious in Dstrace, as you will see a query event that looks something like:
10:19:01 B68BEBA0 LDAP: (10.1.1.42:55133)(0x0002:0x63) Search request:
base: "ou=people,o=acme,dc=com"
scope:2 dereference:3 sizelimit:1 timelimit:0 attrsonly:0
filter: "(&(objectClass=inetorgperson)(acme7DigitName=gxc1234))"
no attributes
10:19:01 B68BEBA0 LDAP: (10.1.1.42:55133)(0x0002:0x63) Empty attribute list implies all user attributes
10:19:01 B68BEBA0 LDAP: (10.1.1.42:55133)(0x0002:0x63) Sending search result entry "cn=gxc1234,ou=UNK,ou=People,o=acme,dc=com" to connection 0xa07e6c0
There the scope: 2 tells you it is an entry search. You want to see it do a subtree (0) level search in order to get what you are looking for.
You can read more about how I used this sort of tooling to debug the nonsense that SAP's GRC web interface does for LDAP data retrieval.
To visualize and administer LDAP, there are many options, here are some.
I personally use ldapsh to perform some quick ldap edits. It visualizes your ldap tree as directory structure which is easy to navigate and make edits using vim or your fav editor.
Best Answer
Yes.
No.
There are various OpenLDAP slave replication configuration options about that. Depending on the LDAP API you use you may be able to enable referral-chasing automatically, as for example you can in Java JNDI.