LDAP System Administration

Distributing the Directory

The scenarios presented thus far have all assumed that the entire directory consists of a single partition on one server. In the real world, this may not always suffice. There are many reasons (which I touched on in Chapter 2) for splitting a directory into two or more partitions, which may reside on multiple servers.

Let’s assume that, according to Figure 5-2, the top level of your directory server (dc=plainjoe,dc=org) is maintained by one department, and the server containing host information (ou=hosts,dc=plainjoe,dc=org) is managed by another. How can these two directories be combined into one logical DIT?

Figure 5-2. Two separate directory partitions held by different servers

The definition for the ou=hosts partition held by the second server is very similar to the database section we have been using so far. The main changes are to the suffix served by the backend (ou=hosts,dc=plainjoe,dc=org) and the directory in which the BerkeleyDB files are stored (/var/ldap/hosts/). The rootdn (cn=Manager,ou=hosts,dc=plainjoe,dc=org) must also be updated due to the requirement that it must exist within the partition’s naming context.

####################################################### ## Partition on second server holding ou=hosts database bdb ## Define the root suffix you serve. suffix "ou=hosts,dc=plainjoe,dc=org" ## Define a root DN for superuser privileges. ...