Understanding LDAP (part 1) (
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Wish there was a global Yellow Pages so that you could find people
on the Web quicker? LDAP might just be what you're looking for. In this
introductory tutorial, get up to speed on basic LDAP concepts, including the
LDAP information model, LDAP objects and LDAP naming conventions.The nice thing about the Internet is that there's so much information on it. The
bad thing about the Internet is that there's so much information on
it.
This might seem a little cliched, but it's true - the Web is rich in
information, but poor in the tools needed to index and search it. Google's (
http://www.google.com/) doing a great job of
fixing this problem, but it's still limited largely to collating and indexing
published content. If, for example, you're looking for the email address of Sam
Jones, who you *know* works somewhere in Long Beach with Rough Rubber Shoes, or
the telephone number of your great-grand-uncle Josh, who moved to New York a few
years back and was never heard from again, you're outta luck - Google can't help
you, and neither can any of the other search engines out there.
What
would be ideal in this situation is an Internet version of your local telephone
directory, a public database of users and their affiliations, locations and
contact information that you could query at the click of a button. Something
that made it possible to easily search for resources (users, computers,
businesses) by different attributes, that was universally accessible, and that
was versatile enough to be used for different applications.
Something
like LDAP.
