In my case, I am doing the change because of Samba. When you run tesparm, the lastest versions of Samba give the following warning:
In any case, if surviving the boot process is desired, the changes should specifically be tested at boot, not just from a root login shell. This issue trips up even seasoned administrators (*ahem*).
--keith
Agreed, I put mine in the rc startup script for ldap. I would suggest only putting into what ever process needing it vs a system wide var.