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Technology Books Media Book Reviews

Deploying OpenLDAP 117

Posted by timothy from the eldap-hubbard dept.
Dustin Puryear writes "I work extensively with LDAP as a consultant, and so I'm always reading the latest and greatest books and articles on the subject. It's just part of the business. So I was excited to see "Deploying OpenLDAP," by Tom Jackiewics and published by Apress, on Amazon's electronic bookshelf. After reviewing the Table of Contents I quickly ordered the book. This looked good. After all, Jackiewicz had some great chapter titles such as 'Implementing Deployment, Operations, and Administration Strategies.' That just sounds smart. Before giving you my feelings on the book, let me first say that I'm already well experienced with LDAP. This is especially true with OpenLDAP. With a title like "Deploying OpenLDAP" I was expecting a book that tackled not just low-level tactical issues such as installing OpenLDAP binaries, but strategic ones as well, e.g., how to design access control. So if you have never used OpenLDAP then your experience with the book may differ." Read on for the rest of Puryear's review.
Deploying OpenLDAP
author Tom Jackiewicz
pages 344
publisher Apress
rating 5
reviewer Dustin Puryear
ISBN 1590594134
summary HOWTO for installing and using OpenLDAP.

The book begins with a quick note that the target audience is those wishing to install and configure OpenLDAP, and not those that wish to delve into the intricacies of LDAP architecture. Unfortunately, Jackiewics delivers on this promise. While I didn't expect the book to provide me with a guide on enterprise-level LDAP deployment, I had hoped to see more focus placed on design, but that wasn't forthcoming.

The first chapter, "Accessing Your Environment," is a moderately good review of how to identify key elements of your company that are appropriate for inclusion in a directory service. In addition, Jackiewics makes a clear case that an LDAP directory is not a relational database -- so don't try to replace Oracle with OpenLDAP. A very good point.

Chapter 2, "Understanding Data Definitions," provides background information on how schemas are defined. Basically, a schema is just the types of object classes and attributes that your directory supports. Jackiewics actually does a good job covering customized schemas, which is a troublesome area for new OpenLDAP administrators.

It was in Chapter 3, "Implementing Deployment, Operations, and Administration Strategies," that I was hoping to get some real nuggets of information. Alas, that wasn't forthcoming. The chapter should be renamed to "Where to put your OpenLDAP server on the network, and what to name the server." There are some areas of this chapter that really disappointed me. The most culpable: Jackiewics spends almost four pages explaining how to come up with a good hostname for your server, and then a brief page on understanding OpenLDAP's log file, and that brief page mostly contains example output. This chapter is also a good example of a bad book layout -- why are we reading about hostname conventions in the same chapter that discusses debug output?

Chapter 4, "Installing OpenLDAP," is a decent HOWTO for installing OpenLDAP. It also provides several manpages in case you accidentally deleted the 'man' command on your own system.

Chapter 5, "Implementing OpenLDAP," is kind of the "catch all" chapter. Jackiewics discusses how to decide on hardware, but his examples aren't very clear. One of the real gems of the book is his discussion on SASL and OpenLDAP. In addition, there is a reasonable discussion of replication between OpenLDAP servers. Alas, there is almost no troubleshooting on replication, and replication does hiccup at times. (Indeed, this book contains essentially no help in troubleshooting any problems.) Another sore point: Jackiewics only provides a single paragraph on access control (i.e., OpenLDAP ACLs). That topic alone deserves its own chapter.

Because Jackiewics had specifically stated that this book's scope was quite narrow I would typically be more lenient. However, Chapter 6, "Scripting and Programming LDAP," consumes sixty pages that are immediately outside the book's scope. I would prefer to see this chapter removed entirely, and the sixty pages devoted to a chapter on troubleshooting OpenLDAP and deciphering slapd's debug log file, and perhaps another chapter on designing a scalable replication infrastructure using OpenLDAP. Unfortunately, what we get is essentially sixty pages of manpages and documentation labeled as "Scripting and Programming LDAP."

Jackiewics closes the book with Chapter 7, "Integrating at the System Level," and Chapter 8, "Integrating OpenLDAP with Applications, User Systems, and Client Tools."

Chapter 7 discusses how to replace "old technology," such as NIS and Sendmail alias files, with LDAP. Not a bad chapter, although Jackiewics continues to delve too far into man-page material. Chapter 8 provides examples of using LDAP in Apache, Pine, Samba, and various other types of clients.

Overall, I would say that I left this book with little new information. People that are just now installing OpenLDAP may find the book beneficial, but I really didn't see any material that stood out. My personal belief is that this "Deploying OpenLDAP" needs to provide far more troubleshooting and example deployment scenarios and less regurgitation of manpages and HOWTOs.

You can purchase Deploying OpenLDAP from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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Deploying OpenLDAP

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  • Can somebody answer this (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 14, 2005 @03:34PM (#11936151)

    Whenever I've looked into LDAP, all the tutorials seem to revolve around organising things into geographical locations. This just seems backward to me, and I can't believe for a second that this is how you are meant to use LDAP. Is this really the case, and if not, can anybody suggest some good learning material that doesn't set things up this way?

    • Re:Can somebody answer this (Score:5, Insightful)

      by FreeLinux ( 555387 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @03:39PM (#11936222)
      Geographic division of the LDAP tree is very common and works best for most situations but it is not a requirement. Depending on your environment you may prefer to divide the tree by department(political) or by function, or any other way you can think of. What usually makes the decision for you is your business process and network operation/replication.

      There are many books available that cover this topic. From this review, I would skip this particular book.

    • Re:Can somebody answer this (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 14, 2005 @03:47PM (#11936337)
      This is really a carryover from the now largely-obsolete X.500 days. In most cases, a geographical based setup (or in fact, breaking up the DIT at all) is not the best practice. RFC 2247 recommends using domain components based on your DNS domain (so if your domain is example.com, then you could use dc=example,dc=com). Most of the large deployments (at least in the millions of users) I have seen do this. Once you have the suffix named, then it is often best to just leave it relatively flat below that (e.g., all users below "ou=People,dc=example,dc=com") and use attributes within the entries to provide logical arrangements of users.

      Note, however, that some directory servers do not perform well or scale very well to larger systems, and therefore they often recommend that you break up the DIT so you can spread it across multiple systems in order to handle the necessary load. If you're in a situation where this might be necessary, then perhaps it's a better idea to look at a directory that can scale.

      • Re:Can somebody answer this (Score:5, Interesting)

        by FreeLinux ( 555387 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @04:00PM (#11936482)
        Most of the large deployments (at least in the millions of users) I have seen do this. Once you have the suffix named, then it is often best to just leave it relatively flat below that (e.g., all users below "ou=People,dc=example,dc=com") and use attributes within the entries to provide logical arrangements of users.

        Just how many LDAP deployments of millions of users have you seen? That were flat no less?

        I've seen hundreds of implementations. Most of the ones I've seen had thousands or hundreds of thousands of objects in them and one had over a million objects. I have not seen any implementation, with more than a couple of hundred objects, that was flat.

        The thought of a flat tree with millions of objects sounds like a replication nightmare!
        • How would a flatter DIT alter replication significantly? At the very least, it would be easier to manage with fewer replication agreements. Would you be referring to catching up to the changes? That problem would exist no matter what, given a certain number of entries or number of changes.

          I'd be interested in hearing your experience, as I've been on deployments with hundreds of thousands of users under an OU. Most directory structures are going for a flatter design (per resource type), using attributes
        • Obviously you are talking about replication agreements that can only be defined at distinctive branch points in your DIT (ie, OUs). The more rebust Directories can do replication on an attribute level (Novell eDir comes to mind but there are others).

          Bottom line: It's very 1995 to create your DIT based upon location or department. I've worked with more than 1 Fortune 10 company that had several million entries in a Directory with only a handful of branches in their DIT. Think about having to move users in

          • Re:Can somebody answer this (Score:1, Informative)

            by Anonymous Coward
            OUs work great for healthcare.

            corporate office -> many hospitals -> many clinics & doctors offices / users on local network

            Its useful depth :)

            A shallow OU for us would be a nightmare
        • Flat actually works better for replication. I've done designs that have 2mm, 8mm and 10mm users. When you get to that level, flat is best, and small numbers of attributes is highly recommended. On the 2mm, the tree was c=US, dc=company,dc=net. Below that was ou=people, ou=companies, ou=divisons. Under ou=people were all 2mm users. They had 22 attributes attached. The replication was from one master to 2 rep hubs to 8 consumers. It served as the basis for a portal. Worked like a charm.

          Yes, this was on real
          • One mistake people make in LDAP is to make it look like an organization chart-- big mistake. Use your attributes to create context and you'll be fine. Just keep your entry small.

            Give the man a cigar!
            screw this dividing everything up in branches... attributes are the way to do this.
        • I have managed a large corporate LDAP implementation which has around 120,000 people in a flat branch of the tree. I have tested this to a million and have seen real world implementation with similar numbers.

          Branches of trees should be used for your replication design and security model, they were very important as search bases in X500 but much less so in a typical LDAP directory.

          Consider a organisation which has people in multiple countries. It is just as efficient to run a search from the base of people
    • I don't know if any of these directly answer your question, but there is a whole raft of available LDAP books from places like B&N: for example here [barnesandnoble.com].
    • I'll probably get crucified for this, but the Microsoft Press books on Active Directory actually get this right. It's specificially focused on Active Directory, of course, but there's a lot of it that is applicable to any form of LDAP. MS recommends that you configure your sites (essentially, units of replication) based upon geography and you configure your LDAP based upon the IT organization. Factors to take into account include administration responsibilities and security concerns. Sometimes, this coi
      • There's two primary differences between AD design and conventional LDAP directory designs.

        While AD is extensible and you can use it in nearly any instance where you could use a "standard" LDAP directory, it's designed for a corporate network. The basic structure, client access, and replication topology of AD is meant to serve this end. It's less flexible, but it works really well.

        AD was created in 2000, where broadband and otherwise high speed connections were quickly becoming commonplace between compa
        • Just to refine what you said a bit for any lurkers who may not be familiar with AD, AD is segmented by domains. All domains in a forest share a common schema, but not a common LDAP database. (There's a second database, called the Global Catalog, that IS common to and replicated across all domains.) If you do have an area that is connected by a low-speed connection, you can minimize replication traffic by giving it its own domain. Additionally, you can establish site links and designate bridgehead server
          • With AD in 2003 it gets a bit better where if a site does not justify having a whole new domain (i.e small amount of users or computers and slow link) by and putting a GC is not possible, by enabling Universal Caching will speed up logons.

            Designating a specific server to be the bridgehead should only be done manually (opposed to the KCC designating it's own) if there appears to be some impact on one of the DCs during replication.
            If you specify the bridgehead and it goes down, replication to the opposite si
    • Not necessarily. Though it's common to do this, you can organise LDAP differently. Another way a lot of companies do things is via company departments and divisions. It really all depends on what is most flexible for your company.

      I guess that many books on LDAP just assume that you are part of a multinational company and use this as an example.

  • Chapter title based review (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @03:35PM (#11936171)
    It was in Chapter 3, "Implementing Deployment, Operations, and Administration Strategies," that I was hoping to get some real nuggets of information. Alas, that wasn't forthcoming

    What a surprise. I would have expected each of these substantial areas to have their own individual chapters on strategy.

  • Access Control (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 14, 2005 @03:39PM (#11936219)
    strategic ones as well, e.g., how to design access control.

    Are there any books on this? I have no problem setting up OpenLDAP (the docs are pretty clear) but am not in a position to use it in anger because I don't have the benefit of learning from other peoples high level mistakes. Access Control is the biggest question mark for me.

    • My biggest question is in schema design. I mean there are hundreds of schemas out there yet it seems next to impossible to put them together intelligently to get an object that would allow something along the lines of

      • name, nickname,position, etc.
      • contact info (address,phone,email)[home/biz/alternate]
      • samba/ u nix/whatever identities
      • GPG public/private keys, x.509 certificate information, etc.
      • connection information (secretaries, wife, children, pets)
      • anniversaries (birthday,marriage,etc.)
      • photo
      • biometric ID
      • some
      • Then make your own schema. It's really easy to do, you just have to watch on the numbering. Take a look at a schema file in OpenLDAP, for example, and you'll see what I mean. It's very straight-forward, and they're fairly self-documenting.

        If you poke around you can find schema's for apps out here, like Netscape. There are keywords to mark compatible types too.

        • You missed my point, almost entirely.

          I didn't say I couldn't create my own schema. I said that something as obvious as what I described should already exist somewhere, and I was hoping someone reading knew where it was. I didn't want to reinvent the wheel with something inferior. I mean I can't be the only person on the planet who is looking for even 70% of what I listed. I'm sure it's been done before and likely includes things I didn't even think of.

          That's the bigger problem with LDAP I think -- onc

  • Disgustingly Bad Book (Score:5, Informative)

    by njcajun ( 588891 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @03:40PM (#11936235) Homepage
    I love the publisher, but I HATE this book. This book covers nothing new, and covers what has been covered ad nauseum poorly, and in such a way as to do a disservice to the reader. The book makes assertions that are completely incorrect, misleading, false, and many other very negative words. For just one highly simplistic example: Tom, LDAP is NOT a database. Gerald Carter's "LDAP System Administration" is a better intro to OpenLDAP, though not a great primer on higher-level LDAP concepts. For that, you need "Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directories": the bible of LDAP. Novell keeps lots of good docs on LDAP lying around, and if you need more on OpenLDAP, there are also some docs on my website. I REPEAT: STAY AWAY FROM THIS "book".
    • Are there any decent books on ldap ? (amazon say no decent books either)

      My problems with ldap:
      1. Why do you have to buy a 'commercial' product (no not MS - but say IBM (domino),Novell (nds))
      2. or Enterprise Linux?

      Please do not get me wrong
      1. Writing ldif files is easy
      2. Ldap (i assume is easy) but only if you have done it before

      Openldap still appears to be a 'priesthood' occult.

      • Re:Disgustingly Bad Book (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        This is because LDAP isn't used widely outside enterprise markets.

        It's not going to be usefull for a web/file/print server unless they are part of a wider sceme.

        It's for managing large amounts of desktop users (as in Microsoft's LDAP service (aka Active Directory)), and user information, which isn't something you see very often with Linux deployments.. yet.
        • Whenever I put someting in production I prefer that is remains 'independant' from a single host

          So should disaster happen I can
          1. fix 'broken' thing
          2. restore backup
          3. change hostname
          4. Problem ?

          Ldap (like imap) is ideal for this
          The sooner a good book on ldap appears the better for Linux.
      • Domino is not the thing to get from IBM for LDAP. It drags along a ton of non-LDAP stuff.

        From IBM, you should go for the Tivoli Directory Server [ibm.com].

        It is a full function DB2-based directory server. Best of all, you can download it FOR FREE.
      • Reasons for problem #1:

        1a.) Multi-master replication. Something very handy to have when you're looking at high-availability environments.

        1b.) Speed. OpenLDAP can be tuned quite nicely, but doesn't match the performance of the commercial app's. If someone has anything contrary to this, I'd love to hear it.

        1c.) Supportability. Having a vendor to yell at when it all falls down in pieces is rather handy.

        I am waiting with baited breath for Redhat's release of the Netscape Directory server 6 code. Tha

        • 1a.) Multi-master replication. Something very handy to have when you're looking at high-availability environments.

          Yup, have to agree here. I do believe OpenLDAP is getting this soon though. I think its in the latest betas.

          1b.) Speed. OpenLDAP can be tuned quite nicely, but doesn't match the performance of the commercial app's. If someone has anything contrary to this, I'd love to hear it.

          I'm sorry I can't give you anything better than colloquial evidence, but I do run a 700,000 email a day system


          • Yup, have to agree here. I do believe OpenLDAP is getting this soon though. I think its in the latest betas.

            Well, it's going to be a moot point as soon as redhat releases the Netscape Directory server source that they bought. They've had a few patches over the years, but nothing that made it into a release.

            I'm sorry I can't give you anything better than colloquial evidence, but I do run a 700,000 email a day system and every mail coming in is one to three LDAP lookups. The CPU load on my load

            • For the record, (700,000 * 3) = 2.1m queries/day. It's a decent load, but it also depends on what kind of queries are being performed and how many entries there are, etc... Just listing how many queries isn't very telling of performance.

              You're right, of course. There are 94,000 entries in the directory. Entries are mostly a posixUser objectClass with a few extra attributes to support our mail system (based on qmail+ldap, but we don't use qmail anymore - we use exim).

              The entries are small. Replication is

      • Openldap still appears to be a 'priesthood' occult.

        I kind of have to disagree. I set it up to replace NIS and serve as a shared addressbook on my little home LAN. I wouldn't say it was easy, but I don't consider myself a once-in-a-lifetime genius and I was able to get it up and running with only the documentation I could find online.

        I'm sure a professional LDAP admin would laugh at my setup, but it serves my purposes and is easy enough to maintain. A steep initial learning curve? Sure. Unlearnable

      • I am working on a tool to make ldap (along with kerberos, sasl, samba etc.) easy to deploy for actual humans :-). At the moment it targets Debian/Ubuntu, but support for additional distros is coming soon. If anyone is interested in making ldap/kerberos ultra-simple to deploy, i.e. easier than AD, check it out: EDSRealmAssistant [tinyurl.com]

        -Mark

    • Re:Disgustingly Bad Book (Score:5, Informative)

      by tjackiewicz ( 867732 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @05:31PM (#11937619)
      There are various improvements that could be made to this book and I appreciate some of the comments that are being made. As a whole, I think that I did a good job with the theory buy could do better in expanding some of the sections and removing areas percieved as filler. In the programming section, which was put together with significant help from Lane Davis, who was responsible for the C section, we could expand into some realistic do's and don'ts and more commentary on the code itself. On reshashing man pages, various parameters were explained and then used in subsequent sections. Additional commentary was given to explain their meaning. But I see how it doesn't give the best first impression in that's what someone flipped to first. Regardless, it's nice when reading them in the restroom away from a terminal ;) They didn't take up a significant portion of any of the sections. For any errors, I think the point got across and I still think there the bulk of the book is a useful guide.
    • Care to recommend something else? There are about a hojillion books of this nature, and I am afflicted with the subtle tyranny of choice. :)

  • Good things about this book (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It covers more recent RFC's that are typically not even mentioned in other references. It also covers both commercial and open source solutions to problems of scaling, standards, and interoperability. Also, this is a fast paced book and covers in just a few pages what other books fill with useless garbage and repetition.

  • Thanks for the Review. Any recomendations? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Confessed Geek ( 514779 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @03:43PM (#11936277)
    Thanks for the frank review!

    Sounds like the book could be replaced with a few google searches.

    Do you have any recomendations for a Good dead tree on OpenLDAP? I'm getting ready to do a small installation and would be very interested in intermediate reference work/howto/security and trouble shooting book

  • Sounds like a new book is in order. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JLavezzo ( 161308 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @03:49PM (#11936357) Homepage
    Judging by the reviewer's comments it sounds like he's in a position to make a better book! And judging by the comments on this article, sounds like it's needed.

    Go for it!

  • ldapsh (Score:5, Informative)

    by oneiros27 ( 46144 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @03:59PM (#11936473) Homepage
    I'd highly recommend that anyone who has to administer LDAP (that's Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, for those who don't use it. [aka NetInfo Services for the mac, or Active Directory for windows]), especially if it's on systems that have tight ACIs for admin rights to look into ldapsh [mayalane.com], which lets you walk the tree using cd, and use vi to edit records.
  • I noticed from the review that this book covers OpenLDAP and SASL integration. Was there any info in the book on integration with Kerberos + SASL? I realize this is probably outside the scope of the book.

    Also, given that this isn't a great book, are there any recommendations for guides on implementing SASL + OpenLDAP out there? Again, I am specifically looking for OpenLDAP + SASL + Kerberos. And pushing even further, any good guides to using Mac OS X as a Kerberos / OpenLDAP client. (Yes, I know OS X Se

    • Re:On a related note... (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Well, OSX has a directory services plugin called LDAPv3. It has preset mappings for Open Directory (which is really OpenLDAP with Apples client management/policy schemas loaded into it), Active Directory (for direct LDAP access), RFC2307, and custom. In custom, you can manually map all LDAP records on the client to suit your needs. You could map all the attributes manually, but if you are setting it up yourself, you should at least start with 2307. It defines a set of attributes that are commonly needed
  • I'e been through the configuration and installation from source of OpenLDAP several times. It's pretty straightforward. Where I run into trouble is the schemas. It's incredibly hard to find EASY-TO-UNDERSTAND docs on schemas. I've glanced at the RFCs, but they are too atomic for my needs. The two main things that I think any beginner needs to know with LDAP are:

    1. What are the existing default Classes and attributes in OpenLDAP?
    2. How do you add your own custom classes and attributes?

    My most recent e

    • Re:OpenLDAP Schemas? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      To get information on what schema elements (objectclasses and attributes) with syntactic rules and dependencies, you can either login to your server running slapd and start reading *.schema, or you can use some gui-tool like Luma or GQ. Both these and possibly other tools have schemabrowser.

      Proprietory implementations like Oracle Internet Directory and Sun Java Directory Server among others have their own java gui to browse and edit schema elements as they store this information inside the ldap dabase an

    • You are right about the lack of good material on schema design. I surveyed the web a few months ago and found very little (and some of what I did find was trying to treat LDAP as a relational database!).

      As a result, I ended up presenting a paper on LDAP Schema Design at the UKUUG Winter Conference. [ukuug.org] The paper covers issues of tree design and also entry design, and explains why the examples used in X.500 and early LDAP documents are not indicators of good practice. The full paper is available from my own w [skills-1st.co.uk]

  • Missed opportunity (Score:2, Informative)

    by iksrazal_br ( 614172 )
    Too bad about the book, I'm in the market. I've used OpenLDAP for the last 1 1/2 years as a programmer and administrator. I struggled alot and google only helped so far. What I would like to see is an OpenLDAP book that:

    1) Has a good explanation of how to implement InetOrgPerson, including userCertificate;binary and digital certificates.

    2) Explains ACL's in depth, particular to OpenLDAP.

    3) Cover some of the schemas, such as java.schema for storing serialized java objects like Strings and HashMaps. I n

  • Microsoft Won (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LordMyren ( 15499 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @05:11PM (#11937334) Homepage
    I really think the absolute VOID of good practical LDAP books is why microsoft is winning.

    If ldap had any documentation for how it would be used, there would be stunning amazing products to pound the living tar out of Active Directory. Unfortunately for free software and whatever author-should-be that never decided to get rich, no one has stepped up to the plate.

    There is no more pressing need. Period. At all. Directory services are absolutely vital to absolutely everyone.

    I've been pissed off over this for years. I got the whole LDAP+Kerberos+PAM+every service known to man thing working but could not for the life of me figure out how to build an ldap infrastructure to manage it. Albiet I was so tired of the whole project by the time I got there I didnt have much patience (and all too many other projects).

    Basically RedHat and Novell exist based on making people pay for their proprietary directory services. I realize cutting them out could be concieved of as a bad thing, but I'm sure they can adapt. On the other hand, Microsoft will finally have gained a sincere challenger.

    Myren
    • AD is winning because of the MS domination on the desktop. It has nothing to do with LDAP in general. In order to have a well managed windows based network you need AD. It's really just that simple. Yes, there's an auhtenticaiton plugin system in windows that novell implements....but that's gotten novell next to nowhere. Every network out there that has windows machines runs AD. What's interesting is that AD is now moving out of the NOS space and into e-biz/enterprise space. People are using AD to ma

      • Re:Microsoft Won (Score:5, Insightful)

        by LordMyren ( 15499 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @06:22PM (#11938190) Homepage
        This is so back-asswards its almost funny.
        First off, and FYI, AD is LDAP+Kerberos. "It has nothing to do with LDAP in general"

        MS domination of the desktop is because of services like Active Directory, not the other way around. Windows would be nowhere if evolution ended at shared folders. You yourself state "In order to have a well managed windows based network you need AD," which is exactly my point. To have a well managed network you need directory services. No directory services, no prayer, no desktop domination.

        Which brings me back to my point; its a joke to think of people trying to promote Linux to buisness or consumers when there's no directory services and no docs for how design them should you be dumb enough to try building them yourself. There's docs for how to build them (as in, ./configure, make, make install + some conf file help), but no good books for some of the most important subjects in the world: how to architect a solution with these tools. I've found nothing good which takes you from there "here's LDAP" stage to the building scalable enterpise ldap solutions stage.

        Myren

        • Re:Microsoft Won (Score:3, Insightful)

          by ookaze ( 227977 )
          I strongly disagree with you on some points.
          I've done a study for the company I work for now, to help make a choice between directory services (Free Software/Open Source, Novell OES, Microsoft AD). I have also implemented the OpenLDAP/Kerberos/PAM/... platform in the past.
          I saw the problems. You are right with the fact that nowadays, there is still a lack of administrative tools. That is the only lack, though a big one.
          Vendors like Red Hat are taking care of that right now, they will have a solution soon, a
    • As others have explained, the prevelance of Windows desktops is one reason why Active Directory is being widely deployed. One alternative that runs on Linux is PADL's XAD [padl.com].

  • In reality (Score:2, Insightful)

    by hellfire_23 ( 65678 )
    In reality this book is meant to be for LDAP beginners and Tom does make that clear. I believe the book was actually originally written as a college text which further strengthens the point is geared for a beginner. Having a actual paperback book on man pages and scripting examples is probably one of the most lacking pieces of documentation around for LDAP. The only good docs I've found on Net::LDAP and even the php libraries are only the authors api docs. The truth is you need scripting examples to get
  • obligatory link to a book on amazon:

    Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory services:
    http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de tail/-/0672 323168/qid=1110838872/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl 14/002-0439029-3995207?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

    A good book.
  • One thing I really like on negative reviews is a recommendation of an alternative.
  • MS has for free downloading their wonderful book on LDAP: Windows_Security_and_Directory_Services_for_UNIX. z ip
    (a large pdf file inside the zip)
    Search for the title on MS Downloads site. This is a very good book that covers the Unix side of LDAP as well as it does their AD implementation of LDAP.

    This is one area that MS got right. They started with open standards and then enhanced it for their servers, while keeping full access to Unix servers. I have no problem with this. We want LDAP mostly so we can in
  • Does anyone know of a decent/usable OSS LDAP browser that includes schema/template editing? I'm using a closed source Java LDAP browser which barely works, but haven't found anything else even comparable yet.
  • Sorry to hear about this book. However:

    LDAP Programming, Management, and Integration by Clayton Donley

    is an excellent book on the basics of how LDAP works and how to set up LDAP services.
  • I have a vague understanding of what OpenLDAP is. I have a network with 150 users using central samba server as a primary domain controller. what benefits would I have with openldap that I don't have now?
  • There's a book by Terpstra (of Samba's fame) coming this summer:


    If the quality is similar to any other of his Samba books, then this will become one of the best LDAP books.

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