NSS LDAP and z/Linux

Greetings,

I've been trying to figure this out and this looks like the place for help.

We're trying to get NSS setup talking to an LDAP server running on z/OS (390 hardware). The Linux image we are using is SLES 9. For some reason for a user to logon, I still need them to have an entry in the local /etc/passwd file.

In /var/log/messages:

For users defined in /etc/passwd I get:
nss_ldap: could not search LDAP server - Server is unwilling to perform

For users not defined in there (but defined in LDAP) i get a
error trying to bind as user "racfid=<userID>,profiletype=USER,ou=racfz" (Invalid credentials)

/etc/nss_ldap.conf is symlinked to ldap.conf.
/etc/nsswitch.conf is below:

passwd: ldap compat
shadow: ldap compat
group:  ldap compat

passwd: compat
group:  compat

There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of info on z/VM/Linux so I'm wondering if I am missing something??
Any help is appreciated.  

<insert non-denominational holiday greeting here>!