Ldap – No base DN returned from server.Plase enter the base DN manually- Apache Directory Studio

Well, the issue is with Apache Directory Studio:

In the path use / instead of \ in the path.

For instance, if key is present in C:\keys.ks then it should be entered as C:/keys.ks

This is not a good user experience.

P.S: this issue is reported at https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/DIRSTUDIO-908

The technical reason is that both the groupOfNames and the person objectClass are mutually exclusive. They are both structural classes but without a subordinate relationship, making them different objectClass chains and according to RFC 4512:

An object or alias entry is characterised by precisely one structural object class superclass chain which has a single structural object class as the most subordinate object class.

A group has members, but a person is not a group and can't have members like a group.

As far as I know you normally make a person a member of a group and the LDAP server provides an internal function to maintain the reverse lookup mapping to easily retrieve the groups an object belongs to, a virtual attribute if you will, typically the memberOf attribute. ApacheDS may not support this (yet).

In other words, the groups an LDAP object belongs to is not a property of the object itself and you should probably not even desire to try to maintain that manually.