LDAP System Administration

LDIF

Most system administrators prefer to use plain-text files for server configuration information, as opposed to some binary store of bits. It is more comfortable to deal with data in vi, Emacs, or notepad than to dig though raw bits and bytes. Therefore, it seems fitting to begin an exploration of LDAP internals with a discussion of representing directory data in text form.

The LDAP Interchange Format (LDIF), defined in RFC 2849, is a standard text file format for storing LDAP configuration information and directory contents. In its most basic form, an LDIF file is:

• A collection of entries separated from each other by blank lines

• A mapping of attribute names to values

• A collection of directives that instruct the parser how to process the information

The first two characteristics provide exactly what is needed to describe the contents of an LDAP directory. We’ll return to the third characteristic when we discuss modifying the information in the directory in Chapter 4.

LDIF files are often used to import new data into your directory or make changes to existing data. The data in the LDIF file must obey the schema rules of your LDAP directory. You can think of the schema as a data definition for your directory. Every item that is added or changed in the directory is checked against the schema for correctness. A schema violation occurs if the data does not correspond to the existing rules.

Figure 2-1 shows a simple directory information tree. Each entry in the directory is represented ...