LDAP System Administration

Be more productive and make your life easier. That's what LDAP System Administration is all about.

System administrators often spend a great deal of time managing configuration information located on many different machines: usernames, passwords, printer configurations, email client configurations, and network filesystem configurations, to name a few. LDAPv3 provides tools for centralizing all of the configuration information and placing it under your control. Rather than maintaining several administrative databases (NIS, Active Directory, Samba, and NFS configuration files), you can make changes in only one place and have all your systems immediately "see" the updated information.

Practically platform independent, this book uses the widely available, open source OpenLDAP 2 directory server as a premise for examples, showing you how to use it to help you manage your configuration information effectively and securely. OpenLDAP 2 ships with most Linux® distributions and Mac OS® X, and can be easily downloaded for most Unix-based systems. After introducing the workings of a directory service and the LDAP protocol, all aspects of building and installing OpenLDAP, plus key ancillary packages like SASL and OpenSSL, this book discusses:

Configuration and access control
Distributed directories; replication and referral
Using OpenLDAP to replace NIS
Using OpenLDAP to manage email configurations
Using LDAP for abstraction with FTP and HTTP servers, Samba, and Radius
Interoperating with different LDAP servers, including Active Directory
Programming using Net::LDAP

If you want to be a master of your domain, LDAP System Administration will help you get up and running quickly regardless of which LDAP version you use. After reading this book, even with no previous LDAP experience, you'll be able to integrate a directory server into essential network services such as mail, DNS, HTTP, and SMB/CIFS.

Customer Reviews:

Great basic implementation ideas, lacking in some areas

By C. Miller "IdoNotes" - July 18, 2004

The book starts with a section on a brief introduction of LDAP before moving in LDAPv3 overview. OpenLDAP takes two chapters, then a section of chapters on Application Integration. Letting LDAP replace NIS, integrating with email, Unix and LDAP, LDAP interoperability and LDAP and Perl finish the chapters off. There are some appendixes that include some of the common Attributes and Objects also.If you are using Windows and some LDAP application this book does not contain a lot of information for you specific to the OS, but is a great reference for LDAP overall. Most of the code examples rely on Unix understandings. The review of access and OpenLDAP applies directly to numerous systems in understanding how rights are applied.Replication and referrals is a great topic that is covered well for the beginner. For someone wanting advanced architecture ideas and designs, this chapter does not go deep enough for you. But I enjoyed it still letting me review and pick up a few items... read more

LDAP System Administration review

By Bill Strosberg, CISSP - April 15, 2005

This book provides a good introduction to implementing OpenLDAP. I found the authors "jumped" tangentially around quite a bit topically, rather than following an idea from start to finish. It was a bit disconcerting following the examples and being interrupted with background material constantly. This may be an editorial problem, as usually backreferences to material are enclosed in callout boxes, while the topical flow continues.I was surprised at the editing and presentation - it wasn't up to usual O'Reilly standards. I was disappointed with the lack of schema level information - part of what I wanted from the book was an understanding of merging multiple schemas to provide cross -client compatibility of directory service usage - i.e. how can LDAP provide services compatible with Mozilla, Eudora, Outlook etc. with common data storage.All in all, I learned a lot from this book, but I am still needing more material to complete the project I am working on - I'll... read more

Best LDAP admin book I have seen

By James May "creative, dedicated eccentric" - November 6, 2006

This excellent book covers implementing and administering LDAP better than any I have seen. It's apparent to me that a great deal of thought has gone into key paragraphs. Despite some comments to the contrary, the organization is methodical and logical. Throughout the book there are references to other sources to further research related topics.

Chapter 1 LDAP is defined and you are pointed to the appropriate RFC's.

Chapter 2 is an overview of the LDAPv3 and explains very well the format of the LDIF directory data/structure files. Incidentally, I found that this book enhanced my understanding of Microsofts Active Directory which encompasses among other things LDAPv3.

Chapter 3 familiarizes you with the slapd.conf file and the example uses an SSHA hashed rootpw (an OpenSSL algorithm) and introduces you to the use of ACL's in this server config file.

Chapter 4 leads you through building a company white pages using the command line (which you... read more

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