LDAP System Administration

Chapter 1. “Now where did I put that...?”, or “What is a directory?”

I have a fairly good memory for numbers, phone numbers in particular. This fact amazes my wife. For those numbers I cannot recall to the exact digit, I have a dozen or so slots in my cell phone. However, as the company I worked for grew, so did the list of people with whom I needed to stay in contact. And I didn’t just need phone numbers; I needed email and postal addresses as well. My cell phone’s limited capabilities were no longer adequate for maintaining the necessary information.

So I eventually broke down and purchased a PDA. I was then able to store contact information for thousands of people. Still, two or three times a day I found myself searching the company’s contact database for someone’s number or address. And I still had to go to other databases (phone books, corporate client lists, and so on) when I needed to look up someone who worked for a different company.

Computer systems have exactly the same problem as humans—both require the capability to locate certain types of information easily, efficiently, and quickly. During the early days of the ARPAnet, a listing of the small community of hosts could be maintained by a central authority—SRI’s Network Information Center (NIC). As TCP/IP became more widespread and more hosts were added to the ARPAnet, maintaining a centralized list of hosts became a pipe dream. New hosts were added to the network before everyone had even received the last, now outdated, ...