Linux in a Windows World

Configuring an OpenLDAP Server

The first step in using LDAP as a distributed login database is to get the server software running. This process entails obtaining and installing the software, setting it up to handle your domain, setting encryption options, and running the server. The Section 8.3 will show you how to create a directory that contains all your site’s user accounts.

Obtaining and Installing OpenLDAP

OpenLDAP’s official home page is http://www.openldap.org. You can obtain the OpenLDAP source code from this site, but the OpenLDAP site doesn’t host any precompiled binaries. Fortunately, most major Linux distributions provide such binaries, usually under the name openldap or openldap2 (the current OpenLDAP major version number is 2, hence that digit at the end of some OpenLDAP package names). Because most Linux distributions ship with OpenLDAP packages, the assumption in this chapter is that you’re installing the server in this way. If you compile the server from source code, you may need to adjust some filesystem directory paths in the coming descriptions because OpenLDAP installs in /usr/local by default, compared to /usr for most precompiled Linux OpenLDAP binaries.

Whether you install a binary package or compile OpenLDAP from source code, you may need to install several dependencies. These programs are either required for proper OpenLDAP functioning or are optional tools that OpenLDAP can use to provide improved security or other features:

SSL and TLS

The Secure Sockets ...