LDAP System Administration

The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol

Of course, you didn’t buy this book to read about the Domain Name System. And it’s not likely that you were looking for a general discussion of directory services. This book is about a particular kind of directory service—namely, a service for directories that implement the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). LDAP has become somewhat of a buzzword in contemporary IT shops. If you are like me, sometimes you just have to ask, “Why all the fuss?” The fuss is not so much about LDAP itself, but about the potential of LDAP to consolidate existing services into a single directory that can be accessed by LDAP clients from various vendors. These clients can be web browsers, email clients, mail servers, or any one of a myriad of other applications.

By consolidating information into a single directory, you are not simply pouring the contents of your multitude of smaller pots into a larger pot. By organizing your information well and thinking carefully about the common information needed by client applications, you can reduce data redundancy in your directories and therefore reduce the administrative overhead needed to maintain that data. Think about all the directory services that run on your network and consider how much information is duplicated. Perhaps hosts on your network use a DHCP server. This server has a certain amount of information about IP addresses, Ethernet addresses, hostnames, network topology, and so forth in its configuration ...