LDAP System Administration [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Chapter 3. OpenLDAP

While
reading this book, you may find yourself feeling a little like a sky
diver who has just jumped out of an airplane. As you approach the
ground, things come more into focus. As you squint and try to make
out the color of that house far below, you suddenly realize that you
are plummeting closer and closer toward the very thing you are trying
to observe.

Conceptual ideas need concrete implementations in order to solidify
our understanding of them. A directory access protocol is of no use
without an actual implementation that allows us to put the protocol
to work to solve real information problems on a network. This chapter
introduces OpenLDAP, a popular, open source LDAPv3-compliant server.
There are a number of popular commercial products, including Sun
Microsystem's SunOne directory server (formally owned
by Netscape),
Novell's eDirectory
(formally referred to as NDS), and Microsoft's
Active Directory, although this directory encompasses much more than
just LDAP.

Why are we using the OpenLDAP^[1] server instead of one from another
vendor? OpenLDAP is attractive for several reasons:

^[1] The
"Open" in OpenLDAP refers to the
open engineering process and community used to create OpenLDAP
software.

The OpenLDAP source code is available for
download from http://www.openldap.org/ under the OpenLDAP
Public License. Source code can provide a great deal of information
to supplement existing (or absent) documentation.

OpenLDAP 2 is compliant with the core LDAPv3 specifications.

OpenLDAP is available for multiple platforms, including Linux,
Solaris, Mac OS 10.2, and Windows (in its various incarnations). For
more information regarding OpenLDAP on Mac OS 10.2, see
http://www.padl.com//Articles/AdvancedOpenDirectoryConfl.

The OpenLDAP project is a continuation of the original
University of Michigan LDAP server. The
relationship between Michigan's LDAP server and many
modern, commercial LDAP servers can be compared to the relationship
between modern web browsers and the original NCSA Mosaic code base.

The examples presented in this chapter configure OpenLDAP on a
Unix-based server. Therefore, they use standard Unix command-line
tools such as tar, gzip,
and make.