LDAP Problem (only {CRYPT} hash works)

[_markd]

I want/have to set up a central user management for a small office (~50 people, ~20 PCs) where a SambaPDC, a Cyrus-Imapd and Linux SSH login is required.
My plan is to have accounts stored in ldap so I only need to create and passwd once for three services.
I followed the Samba-OpenLDAP howto at http://samba.idealx.org/smbldap-howto.fr.html
and some others (actually started out with the Gentoo-Ldap howto).
The ssh/imap thing is working after all (messed around with it for three days). I haven't tested the samba part (work remotely).
I use the smbldap-tools to manage accounts (for now). The strange thing (my problem) is, that ssh login only works when smbldap-passwd uses the CRYPT (tried MD5 and SSHA) algorithm. No matter to what value I set pam_password in /etc/ldap.conf or password-hash in /etc/openldap/slapd.conf.

Another weird thing is, that the smbldap-tools can only use "normal" ldap on port 389 (tried to setup tls, didn't work) but all other ldap communication (ssh, ldapsearch,...) does not work on 389, but on 636 (ldaps://)

Can somebody explain this strange behaviour to me ? (I can post log entries later in the day (it's 4h AM gotta get 3h sleep))
_________________
-- Student of Telematics at University of Technology in Graz, Austria
-- Running Linux on x86(gentoo), PPC(gentoo), ARM(familiar), SPARC64(gentoo), Alpha(gentoo), MIPS(gentoo) and soon HPPA