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Background Info:
LDAP stands for "Lightweight Directory Access Protocol." Why it's called lightweight I have no clue, since it's a pretty heavy duty and advanced system to use, but oh well. The good thing about LDAP is that it's an open source standard, which means it doesn't cost a lot like a Windows server or OS X server. For a good background and detailed information on LDAP, go to the Open LDAP site. Open LDAP is the LDAP server we will be using for our system.
The benifit of LDAP is it is a "free" open source software product which we will configure to also work with samba, allowing us to authenticate Mac OS X, Windows 2000, and Linux clients from the same sytem with the same accounts and passwords.
Here are some notes on LDAP:
Stores information that is modified infrequently, but is
retrieved frequently.
A Distinguished Name (DN) uniquely identifies an entry.
Entries are made up of Attributes.
Attributes are made up of a Type and 1 or more Values.
Entries are stored in a tree structure.
Entries must obey the schema rules of the objectClass that
describe them.
Lookup is facilitated by a search language that includes
wildcards, and other selection mechanisms.
Setting up and using an LDAP system is a fairly complex task, but well worth it. Our hope is that if you carefully follow our instructions you will be able to duplicate our system for yourself.
Next, let's move on to the LDAP setup instructions.
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