[CentOS] Problems with nss_ldap - where to start?

I've been unsuccessfully trying to get nss_ldap to work. I've chased down hundreds of google searches over the last 3 days, and I can't seem to get a centos system to authenticate against ldap.

Every daemon on the system is running into the same problem:

nss_ldap: could not search LDAP server - Server is unavailable

sshd, nscd, httpd, you name it..

slapd is clearly running, telnet localhost 389 actually connects me to it.

I've run authconfig, /etc/sysconfig/authconfig agrees.

I'm at a complete and utter loss. I've followed every how-to out there, RH, Openldap, Debian, FreeBSD I can verify ldap is working, I can't seem to get any PAM applications to use it.

Peter