LDAP System Administration

Central Printer Management

Now that you’ve moved your DNS zone data into an LDAP directory, you have the leisure to ask, “What’s the big deal?” DNS already has highly effective mechanisms for distributing and replicating zone data; it’s not like user account data, which needs to be kept consistent on every machine. So have you accomplished anything, aside from being able to point to a directory server that’s serving the zone data to your DNS servers? Clearly, you need to be able to justify the effort you’ve spent, and to do so, you need to find another application that can make use of the same data.

Network printers are devices that are associated with entries in DNS and possess additional attributes used to support a non-DNS application (i.e., printing). Our next step is to design a directory-based solution for managing printer configuration information that simplifies the process of adding, deploying, and retiring printers. A printer should be accessible to its clients as soon as it has been added to the directory. The namespace shown in Figure 8-8 was designed with this philosophy in mind. All printer configuration information is stored below the ou=printers organizational unit. The immediate three children, config, global, and location, are used to group printers and maintain configuration parameters.

Figure 8-8. LDAP namespace for directory-based storage of printer configuration ...