Understanding LDAP (part 2) - Opening Up (
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OpenLDAP
is an open-source implementation of the LDAP protocol, providing all the tools
necessary to set up a fairly sophisticated LDAP directory service on your
network. It includes support for version 3 of the LDAP protocol, together with a
bunch of other goodies: Unicode support, authentication, referral support,
replication and extensibility. It also supports a variety of different database
backends for data storage, including Berkeley DB, LDBM and the standard UNIX
password database.
The OpenLDAP suite includes both LDAP servers and
clients. The server I'll be using throughout this tutorial is named "slapd", the
standalone LDAP daemon; the distribution also includes "slurpd", a daemon
designed to handle replication between multiple LDAP servers. The client tools
include "ldapadd" for adding new entries to the directory, "ldapmodify" for
editing entries, "ldapdelete" for deleting entries, and "ldapsearch" for
querying the database. Finally, OpenLDAP also supports SSL encryption for
greater security, and includes an API that allows developers to access LDAP
services from programming languages like PHP and Perl.
Intrigued? Wanna
see it in action? Flip the page, and let's get installing!
