Skip to Content
LDAP System Administration
book

LDAP System Administration

by Gerald Carter
March 2003
Intermediate to advanced
308 pages
9h 36m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from LDAP System Administration

The nss_ldap Module

The Name Service Switch (NSS) is similar to PAM except that it only provides a mechanism for information retrieval. PADL Software’s nss_ldap module can be obtained from http://www.padl.com/OSS/nss_ldap.html. The current implementation can be used on AIX, HP-UX, Linux, and Solaris. Although the pam_ldap module supports FreeBSD and Mac OS 10.2, the nss_ldap library does not. This means that you will not be able to apply the complete solution outlined in this chapter to those platforms.

Compiling PADL’s nss_ldap module is almost the same as compiling pam_ldap. The same options are available to the configure script (for explicitly defining the LDAP libraries to be used and their locations). The one additional compile-time setting that you will use is -enable-rfc2307bis. This change optimizes the search parameters for each nsswitch.conf database by using the nss_base_* parmeters. Otherwise, nss_ldap would query for entries by performing a subtree search beginning at the base (from /etc/ldap.conf). The familiar three-step:

$ ./configure  --enable-rfc2307bis
$ make
$ /bin/su -c "make install"

installs an appropriately named version of the nss_ldap library in /lib. For example, the resulting file would be /lib/libnss_ldap.so on a Linux host and /lib/nss_ldap.so on a Solaris box. Since the examples in this chapter are based on Linux systems, whenever there is a need to refer to the actual nss_ldap library file, I will use the libnss_ldap.so filename.

The nss_ldap module ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services, Second Edition

Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services, Second Edition

Timothy A. Howes - Ph.D., Mark C. Smith, Gordon S. Good

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 1565924916Errata Page