LDAP System Administration

Interoperability or Integration?

The terms interoperability and integration each have a different place within our coverage of LDAP. For our purposes, directory integration means enabling client applications to access data in an LDAP directory, a topic that has been covered extensively in previous chapters. Interoperability should address communication between LDAP servers themselves. The distinction between integration and interoperability begins to blur when one LDAP server becomes the client of another LDAP server.

Whenever you start thinking about interoperability or integration, your first step should be to ask what level of interoperability or integration your application requires. There are a number of solutions that provide interoperability or integration in various forms. Knowing what your application requires will make it much easier to decide which solution is appropriate. Table 9-1 lists some common approaches to interoperability and integration issues.

Table 9-1. Common directory interoperability solutions

Problem	Possible solution	Example
“What can I do if my application doesn’t speak LDAP?”	Gateways that translate one directory access protocol into another	The NIS/LDAP gateway presented in Chapter 6
“How can users in a non-Unix administrative domain access services on Unix hosts?”	Cross-platform authentication services	Authenticating non-Microsoft clients against an active directory
“How can I join information contained in different directories?”	Distributed, ...