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LDAP Tools - Where are they?
fixe asks: "I have spent the last few months up to my eyeballs in LDAP. While I am still hopeful of what LDAP can bring to the table I am admittedly disappointed in the tools, support and documentation surrounding the standard. I have been successful at creating and populating an LDAP directory and even authenticating against it, however I cannot find decent replacements for useradd, userdel, usermod, passwd, etc. Nor have I found any decent LDAP editors or browsers (preferably console or web-based). I am hoping that the Slashdot crowd might be able to shed some light on the subject. Are there any LDAP veterans out there who can reccommend any tools? What is the best way to maintain system account synchronization with an LDAP directory? Or perhaps, is there a more attractive alternative to LDAP?"
I know I'll get flamed like hell for writing this, but I suggest that you check out Microsoft's LDAP tools. I'm not sure about their interoperability with slapd etc, but they play along amazingly with Microsoft LDAP server.
Also, check out gq , which is a pretty nice GTK+ based LDAP client. It's still very barebone, but it's better than the commandline tools for a lot of tasks.
I had to roll most of my own admin scripts. There is a great java based browser/editor though.
http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/~gawor/ldap/
It is the best thing out there as far as I can tell.
Rick
There also doesn't appear to be much corporate interest - Microsoft has moved its mindshare strategies to web services, leaving the only big backer of LDAP being Novell - not really a key industry player at this point.
Slap me with a strongly worded post if I am incorrect, but isn't Active Directory an LDAP implementation?
Unfortunatly, the best LDAP browser/editor I've found so far is neither web- nor console-based, but is a Windows program. LDAPBrowser 2.0, from the nice folks at Softerra, has been invaluable in helping me figure out how to make a bunch of openldap-based client programs talk to an MS Active Directory LDAP server. It's free-as-in-beer, and they have a number of other cool ldap toys available as well.
You would think that wrapping a gtk+ interface around ldapsearch would be a straightforward and no-brainer proposition, but you would apparently be wrong.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
I'm in the process of helping deploy active directory. MS Windows comes with some LDAP tools that aren't too bad. I'm still in the learning stage so I can't frame a good opinion, but first impressions are OK. But like everything Windows if you want to get into the guts of the OS you'll have to dig around for the info. MS prefers you use their MMC based admin tools which don't give you much control.
Go looking for the IBM SecureWay Directory Management Tool (DMT). It's a Java LDAP client that lets you edit the directory manually.
M$ is betting quite a bit on LDAP with AD, touting it as the number one reason for enterprises to move off of NT to 2000 server platforms. Unfortunately upgrading is such a complicated operation very few larger organizations are moving to it as fast as M$ would like. They have integrated all sorts of things into the standard directory service and it can be very confusing trying to figure out exactly what it is.
FWIW, Novell's NDS has been the only enterprise-class directory service since the mid-90's and AD is a play into this arena.
Of course, this is all moot since this is Slashdot and of course you aren't interested in technology from the Dark Empire (tm).
Left shift 1 for e-mail...
Daimler Chrysler is using Novell/LDAP. Sounds like big industry to me...
Nothing to see here. Move along.
There are a few LDAP administrator projects listed on Freshmeat:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/sldapa/
http://freshmeat.net/projects/directoryadmin/
>Yes, there are people using LDAP, there are even people using X.500 - but more or less these >technologies have not altered IT thinking in the dramatic way they were positioned. Arguably the >XML-based approach of web services is more timely -
XML is a file format (or metaformat), not a directory service like LDAP. The two technologies are orthogonal.
>its hard to make an argument of listing >another protocol on an isolated port to provide a >solitary service
<sarcasm> Yeah that's a great idea! Let's run everything over port 80! </sarcasm>
>There also doesn't appear to be much corporate interest - Microsoft has moved its mindshare >strategies to web services, leaving the only big backer of LDAP being Novell - not really a key >industry player at this point.
Hello?? Active Directory is LDAP based. Admittedly it's LDAP with the usual "embrace and extend" twists like proprietary Kerberos extensions and slightly non-standard schemas, but LDAP none the less.
Is what we are using.
To get it:
Go to google, search for "ldap browser" and click "I'm feeling lucky".
Enjoy.
Of course, the standard commandline classics (ldapsearch, ldapmodify, etc.) that come with any of the major vendors stuff (Netscape's SDK, Novell's eDirectory).
Also, I REALLY like the java LDAP Browser for GUI use (available from http://www.iit.edu/~gawojar/ldap)
As far as account creation tools, there's some nice trends among the big user provisioning corporate grade systems (i.e. Access360) to manage accounts in LDAP.
I'd stay away from Active Directory since it doesn't follow all of the standards. eDirectory's only big annoyance is that it's LDAP is actually a mapping on top of their old stuff, so sometimes that adds complexity. But for a long time they had the only multi-mastered replication setup. iPlanent now has that and MS/AD kinda does (but they have crappy granularity on their objects in case of collisions).
I like lots of people. That doesn't mean I go carting them around the galaxy with me. --Dr. Who
YEs, goto Novell for the best directory, and the best LDAP software available.
You can use Novell's eGuide as a good user admin utility VIA ldap. I've never tried it with a generic LDAP directory, but it should work well.
IMHO, if you're going to do anything that requires a large directory, look at NDS. You'll get your basic LDAP services and a lot more, including replication.
Move up to a Novell Netware 6 server, and get load balancing / automatic failover with it!
Ever play a video file off your server, then down the server, and have the video pick up where it left off?
It just fucking rocks.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Have you looked at libnss-ldap? Install that, set up your /etc/nsswitch.conf file to refer to ldap in addition to your other resources, and all well-behaved programs (re: that use the NSS routines in glibc instead of attempting to modify /etc/whatever directly) should update the LDAP records.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I dont know about commercial LDAP offers, but openldap led me to the conclusion to NOT use ldap anywhere. I still have it installed in three locations and am actively working in porting it to mysql or unix flatfiles, because it's so unreliable. nss library from padl.com for some reason doesnt always closes its connections, so you hit 1024 file descriptors limit within a week or so. yes, you can compile with -DFD_SETSIZE, but this only gives you more time until restart is needed. Second, replication never worked reliably, so trying to avoid fd problem with more replicas only casued more pain and sleepless nights rebuilding and reindexing databases (125k user entries, it takes 7 hours on 4way xeon). And if only the slapd itself would work! It stops responding every now and then, for no reason. OK, i can catch these with a trivial script ... but recently, i got more and more examples where connection is accepted, but result never comes ... so ldapsearch just sits there without answer, huh. I've also seen examples where some slapd threads would occupy one or more cpu in the box, slowing things down noticeably.
So, whatever you do, AVOID OpenLDAP.
I use GQ for browsing around in an LDAP. It is a great start on a fully functional LDAP client tool, but still, many options still need to be implemented.
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
I like Jarek Gawor's Java based editor:
http://www.iit.edu/~gawojar/ldap/index.html
Directory Administrator is a GUI (GTK+) frontend for user administration within a LDAP directory. It still requires some knowledge about a LDAP hierarchy, but it helps a lot.
My advice is to create two user hierarchies: one for administrative non-human accounts (e. g. root, mail, www) and one for real users. Same thing for groups. This way you can manage your real-user accounts with some kind of GUI frontend and even re-use the objects in an addressbook like Evolution Contacts without risking a security hole.
I am with a admin group trying to integrate a couple hundred UNIX and Windows machines into a single login using an Active Directory server, which provides us with Kerberos authentication, and an LDAP directory. (This was mandated to us "from above") The kerberos authentication of course was easy, however there is hardly ANY information about actually using LDAP in a production environment.. we are trying to use the active directory LDAP server to provide the POSIX gecos and home directory information for the UNIX clients... however the default Active Directory schema does not include RFC2307
/etc/passwd. This is possible in Linux and Solaris using the nss_ldap module which lets you add an "ldap" entry to your network switch file, and use ldap instead of /etc/passwd. It seems the best solution is Kerberos for authentication and LDAP for everything else, which Active Directory can provide, in a mixed-OS environment even.. but has anyone been able to successfully run nss_ldap against an AD LDAP server? (without using services for UNIX or other kludges)
LDAP seems to be an integration nirvanna.. but without proper documentation I am afraid it will never see broader use..
Probably the most frustrating part is if you go on google and look for help, you see people mentioning that this works, but never any specifics. I assume you are just using pam_ldap to grab a password crypt from an LDAP server (which is a secure as giving everyone read permissions on your shadow file).
I think the best solution is to use an LDAP server to host all the user information that is normally in
As a student I'm doing some research on LDAP usability and -programming.
If you want an all-in-one solution (Server & Gui to populate server), try the iPlanet Directory Server which is kind of free to use (downloadable at netscape.com) and has a really nice interface.
Another nice (non-free) thing is an LDAP-API for Visual Basic from SnarkSoft which allows you to quickly write applications using data from your LDAP server. I know this isn't really a LDAP-solution, but it allows you to easily develop LDAP applications.
Use it wisely
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
Acronym lookup dictionay for your reference:
http://www.ucc.ie/info/net/acronyms/acro.html
LDAP == Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (I think, that's from memory).
LDAP was originally intended to be a more flexible and less resource intensive implementation of Directories (phone books are a good example but not the only one) a'la the older X.500 protocol.
LDAP has been embraced by alot of companies like Microsoft and Sun (my employer) as a core server technology to form the "glue" between distributed services.
One of the most common uses is to maintain remote password authentication databases. Similar in concept to RADIUS or NIS, but in a more standard implementation without all of the overhead.
For instance, Sun is moving it's internal network to LDAP authentication (originally it was unconnected, later they used NIS, both older systems are still in use at Sun right now). It allows an employee to use the same password for many different resources on the internal network while having a single place to update that password.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
RFC 2251:
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (v3)
This protocol is specifically targeted at management applications and browser applications that provide read/write interactive access to directories.
I've got to disagree with your assesment that Novell is not a key industry player. Novell's eDirectory is the premier directory solution in a market that includes Active Directory, iPlanet, OpenLDAP, and others. Microsoft's attempt to cover for their weak directory solution do not in any way detract from the importance of a good directory.
And to answer the original question, eDirectory is the new name for Novell's NDS, a mature yet still evolving directory service that is fully LDAPv3 compliant. As it has been available for so long, there are MANY third-party tools and utilities available to manage it (such as Bindview or JRBUtils) in addition to Novell's own tools and utilities. Novell's eDirectory management utilities include import/export tools built in to ConsoleOne (an admittedly heavyweight Java-based management console) as well as BulkLoad, a command-line LDAP utility that uses LDIF files for command input. These utilities permit import/export of userids in LDIF format, as well as the migration of data between LDAP servers.
eDirectory is fully cross-platform, currently running on Netware, NT, 2000, Linux, Solaris, and Tru64 UNIX. It's been demonstrated at tradeshows with databases of up to one BILLION user accounts. Features of the latest version, 8.6, include persistent searches, dynamic groups, and live backup. The next release is expected to include UDDI, SOAP, and DSML 2.0 support.
Novell is practically giving eDirectory away at a list price of $2/user or less. They are actually giving it away for VARs and developers that wish to bundle eDirectory as the dedicated directory for their applications.
Oh, and if you wish to stay with open source options, look on Freshmeat.net for OpenLDAP - it includes a set of client utilities that should fit at least some of your requirements. Freshmeat should also have other LDAP clients, including browsers.
The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life
checkout:
directory_administrator which is a GNOME LDAP user admin tool (slick enough for use by a frontline helpdesk).
there are other LDAP GUI's, KDE has one. search freshmeat.
gq a general purpose LDAP GUI tool. quite slick, comes with RH7.x.
Also, note that with RH7, the 'passwd' tool uses pam and will hence automatically work with LDAP authentication. (presuming your LDAP server is configured correctly for write access).
finally, you'll probaby want to develop your own scripts with template LDIF's for things like useradd, or find someone who's already done so. (i noticed there's a post on this thread providing a link to exactly that.) Note that for scripting, PADL's migration scripts are very informative. These are included with the OpenLDAP distribution.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
The university that I attend has deployed LDAP for use by it's some 25,000 students, faculty, volunteers, and anyone else associated with the school. As far as I can tell the university has written their own custom perl scripts for interfacing to the directory via a web browser. I have to say it works pretty damn nicely. I'm not sure what it says that they wrote their own scripts, but I suspect it was due to a lack of existing software to get the job done. I hope LDAP doesn't fall to the way side, because it's done very well for this campus.
I posted to
LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, and is basically a method of representing information in a tree-like structure.
:-) ).
For example, to represent the fact that I work for a company (let's call them Foo Inc) in the UK, you could write the following:
c=UK,ou=Foo Inc,cn=Tim Campbell
That identifies the object "Tim Campbell" in the organisational unit "Foo Inc" in the country "UK" (Sorry for any inaccuracaies and the general crapness of the example, it's been a long time since I messed with any LDAP stuff)
The only thing that I've used that uses LDAP is SiteServer, which uses it for the Personalisation and Membership service (which is why it's been such a long time
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
If you can't find LDAP tools, you havn't been looking hard enough. Here (http://www.dbaseiv.net/code/cpu.phtml) is a tool for doing unix style user management with an LDAP directory. Here (http://www-unix-mcs.anl.gov/~gawor/ldap/index.htm l) is a fully functional, really awesome ldap browser that I have used extensively. These are just a tiny sample of all the software for directly working with an LDAP directory. Check the OpenLDAP and IETF lists for more tools, OpenLDAP comes with quite a few as well. :)
If you have paid careful attention, you will notice that LDAP support has crept into hundreds and hundreds (of not thousands) of applications over the last year. The API's for doing LDAP programming yourself are also extremely well developed imho. You have options for C, PERL, C++, Python and a slew of other programming languages. Search Freshmeat or Sourceforge for LDAP and see what you come up with, I think you'll be surprised.
I don't think LDAP is dead, I think it's one of those protocols like TCP that just sneaks up on you with it's usefulness
I am employed by a major aerospace company, and have been using LDAP for several years for web based authentication. This has permitted us the option of "piggy-backing" any other web servers into this authentication scheme. The tools I have used have all been written by myself in Perl, using the Net::LDAP module. I believe there is at least one other module available to use, either available from CPAN. I believe Graham Barr is the author of this module. Using this approach, you should be able to build your own custom webpages for selective browsing of LDAP shares, and management.
If you're seeking some bonafide support options, you might confer with openldap.org, or better yet iPlanet's Directory Server. The latter would cost some money, but it is an option.
TSIA.
/. is filtering out the quotes in the link.
o wn load.novell.com/download.jsp?cat=NDS&pid=646&targe t=sdExpLic.jsp"
The fact is there's a niche between small business (Microsoft products) and Fortune 100 (*Nix) where Novell's products reside quite comfortably.
And eDirectory is a full-featured LDAP implementation in its own right. Not to mention the free version for Linux! (Registration required).
Hey, whad'ya know, I see that
Here it is again in plain text for your cut'n'pasting pleasure:
https://download.novell.com/ICSLogin/?"http://d
Use Console One. It lets you manage your LDAP directory and a whole lot more. Imagine managing users, resources, printers, servers, EVEN files, all from a single Java based tool.
.NET without the bugs and security risks. And, the best part, is it has been shipping for quite a while now, unlike certain other vaporware products.
That's right you can do all this and a whole lot more, using Novell Netware. Even if you don't use Netware, eDirectory (included in Netware or sold separately) allows a lot of these functions from within the Java based Console One. It runs on almost any platform, available today. It even has additional modules that allow things like single signon and more. That's right, all the advantages of
Even if it isn't free, for enterprise use, it is down right cheap!
I've been working with LDAP for the past four years as a manager, consultant, administrator, project manager and architect in various situations and for various companies and clients. My experience has been with Netscape/iPlanet, OpenLDAP and Active Directory. I've worked on very small and very large projects. LDAP has the potential to bring amazing efficiency gains to an enterprise or Internet-based organization (ISP or ASP), but it also is fairly immature.
Let me rephrase that: the protocol is mature and useful, and the servers by and large are mature and useful, but the support tools stink, as a general rule. Since it sounds like you are mostly concerned with user administration, I will stick to just that, and let other people mention tools they've found useful.
If you are using Solaris, AIX or Macintosh, using LDAP for accounts is pretty trivial, since the OS supports it directly - you'll need to have the POSIX user schema loaded, and point the OS's naming service to LDAP instead of its local database. Win2K/XP kind of force you to use Active Directory, so you are also taken care of there. In all of these cases, accounts other than the system superuser will be in LDAP, and so therefore synchronization is not a problem.
useradd, userdel, usermod and passwd are all replaced by ldapmodify, or you can use the tools included with some servers (the iPlanet console being a good example of how to do this right). Right now, there doesn't seem to be any substitute for thoroughly learning ldapsearch and ldapmodify, Perl and Net::LDAP. You can use ldapsearch and ldapmodify for quick actions (adding, modifying or deleting a single user, or changing a password) and Perl and Net::LDAP for more complex operations (or for putting together a CGI for common functions like changing a user's password).
I find I end up writing built-to-purpose Perl tools just about everywhere I go. In some cases, this is because of differences in admin policy at different sites, or differences in schema. In others, the issue is more contractual (whomever is paying me gets ownership of the code I write, so I have to rewrite from a clean sheet at the next site).
The good news is, it is fairly quick and painless to write replacements for useradd, usermod, userdel and passwd which can be run from the command line or as a CGI, and you only have to write them once for your site, if you write them well in the first place.
-jeff
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
I understand that LDAP is supposed to be used for
:]
all kinds of great contact / location / description information, but how is it used in reality? It is used as a really difficult to use properties file. Judging the way most people use LDAP that I've seen, they would have been better off with a sql database. At least with SQL the queries are readable. (o=, c=, wtf= is a pain).
The way I feel about it is that the LDAP 'problem' does exist and is solvable, but the right protocol/implementation does not yet exist. Until something much more friendly and useful comes along, I am firmly off the LDAP bandwagon.
So if you're looking for a good tool to solve your LDAP problems, I suggest Oracle, PostgreSQL or MySQL.
I'm an e-commerce consultant, and I've been surprised in the last 2 years or so the vast number of LDAP-based installations I've seen in all sorts of e-business.
Though not heavily deployed in the enterprise, ESPECIALLY *nix, basically due to the very issues you mention (few admin tools, high complexity), it is heavily used on the web and in Microsoft-centric environments. Active Directory almost follows the LDAPv3 protocols (two non-standard areas are both related to schema implementation. The variations are well documented and do not drastically effect applications)
My admin tool of choice? Sad to say, it is the AD administrator. Second admin tool of choice? Microsoft Site Server 3.0, Commerce Edition's Membership Directory Manager MMC snap-in. Both are Microsoft Management Console snap-ins, but if you can get around that they work alright. The MSS3CE version is even fully LDAPv3 compliant, so you can use it with other directories, too. It also comes with a web interface you can use.
As far as non-MS tools? Haven't seen a one worth it's salt, though a couple of my co-workers recommend talking to the NetIQ folks if that's your bend...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Weird, as this came in just yesterday on kde-pim:
;-)
Carillon Information Security Inc. would like to announce the release of
KDirAdm version 0.1
K DIRectory ADMinistrator is a tool for use by Directory Administrators to
manage their LDAP based directory. Using the K Desktop Environment (KDE) and
OpenLDAP toolsets, this application currently has all of the basic
functionality required to browse, add, and delete directory entries. As this
is an initial BETA release, the capability to modify existing entries, as
well as the ability to handle binary directory objects is currently missing.
This is planned for the next release, along with improved password entry
handling and possibly LDAP over SSL support.
KDirAdm is open source software released under the GNU Public License. As
such we encourage anyone to help us in the development of this software.
Specific jobs that need doing at the moment are improving the documentation,
the artwork, and of course, any LDAP wizards that want to help out will be
greatly appreciated.
The homepage for KDirAdm is at:
http://www.carillonis.com/kdiradm
where both source and Debian packages may be obtained.
Comments, suggestions, wishlist items and patches may be sent to
ppatterson@carillonis.com
So, it's "pre-beta" but has that ever stopped a true free software geek before?
ConsoleOne is a graphical, cross platform GUI tool that allows you to do pretty much every thing. Add, Delete, Create, Modify, Search, Extend the schema, etc.
There's also the ICE (Import, Convert, Export) tool which allows you to import, convert and export data from LDIF or other LDAP servers. ICE is available in a GUI and command line version.
eDirectory is also managable through a browser, and if you use their DirXML product you can basically take any data from any system and expose it through LDAP.
Novell's eDirectory is redistributable for developers. If you do development work, check all their goodies at their development site. You'll find LDAP class libraries, tools etc.
The evaluation copy of eDirectory can be found here and includes the tools mentioned.
I've finished the process of migrating a fairly large ISP/Telco (1.5M users) to LDAP a couple of months ago. I've been at it for over a year, and
from my own experience I can tell you that:
1 - The best available tools are definitely the command-line that come with most servers.
2 - OpenLDAP sucks big time in large scale environments. It's replication is anything but reliable
3 - GQ is a very, very nice browser for LDAP. But I wouldn't use it for administration.
4 - You can assemble a whole range of ISP services (mail, ftp, http, whatever) based on an LDAP tree. Even if you can't find a _insert favorite daemon here_ supporting LDAP, you can always use...
5 - PAM/NSS LDAP. It just rocks. If you configure it properly, anything using PAM/NSS will use/update your tree accordingly. This includes unix tools like "passwd", "useradd", or "finger", or services like QPopper and OpenSSH.
6 - The best way to automate some processes is to create our own tools. Net::LDAP is very easy to use, and does anything you can think of (in terms of LDAP ops)
--
Failure is a human trait. Luckily, I'm not human
Thinking of LDAP as a storage system is the path to utter confusion. LDAP is an interface spec, more like http than like a web server. Any underlying system can support LDAP queries or http connections if it provides the correct interface behavior.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
RIT has a mildly nice system... here. Basically, you can look people up on campus by e-mail address. Individual users can change their own listing. I know little about the actual implementation though.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Object Identifiers
- [OIDs Registry]
Schema Browsers- [Softerra
LDAP Browser]
- [Java LDAP browser/editor]
Language Libraries- [LDAP client API for
Python]
Exchange SchemaWell that's fantastic. Except you failed to mention even ONE of all the tools you had "NO PROBLEM" finding. Why did you even bother posting you piece of shit?
I keep hearing all of these announcements about LDAP-generic tools, but I don't think anybody is answering his questions. He's talking about USER-SPECIFIC tools, which is rather lacking. Granted, there are many different schemas for users, but it's more or less only a couple of standard schemas (that come with OpenLDAP).
There's not that many good user management tools for LDAP. I don't feel like typing it in on raw mode with GQ, when a lot of it is duplicate information (to make sure it gets caught with the different schema names).
Zodiac Survey
As the host of open-it.org, are entire focus is solving this problem. Many people are actively working on integration with ActiveDirectory, and other tie ins, and people loosely associated with Open-IT are working in various projects that help resolve this (Samba-TNG supports ldap backends).
As for management, we now host Directory Administrator,a great GTK front end to user management, I have also created a simply useradd program for creating users in ldap (its called addluser).
We are currently working on a new release of Directory Administrator with a new backend which will allow CLI, GUI, and Web clients to be built on it. Further, if you love WebObjects, Apple just released 5.1, which has a JNDI adaptor, allowing quick Web Apps to be built against LDAP directory servers using Java.
Is the documentation not up to snuff at Open-IT, then help out! We have some basic howtos, and I package pam_ldap, nss_ldap, openldap, and other great things to get you going.
Back to work...
Well, I'll post a pointer to Ganymede, which is not specifically for LDAP, but which could probably be useful in a lot of environments.
Ganymede is at once simpler than LDAP, in that it doesn't support the kind of hierarchical objects that LDAP and x.500 support, and in that it doesn't actually speak LDAP, and more complex, in that it has a sophisticated transactions model and can handle complex concurrent operations while maintaining namespace and referential integrity.
Ganymede is useful if you want to have a smallish (less than 50,000 users, say) 'flat' directory, but for which you want to allow detailed permisison delegation and fine-grained concurrency. If you have a very large NIS domain and you want to allow scores of users and admins to be changing their passwords and account information concurrently, Ganymede will work wonders for you.
We actually use Ganymede for just about everything here, up to and including our DNS, although we don't have our DNS support code 'productized' yet. We do master our LDAP directory from Ganymede data, in order to support applications which can use an LDAP server for an address book (such as Outlook and Netscape Messenger). If you were to combine Ganymede with something like Thomas Reith's ldapdiff utility, you could combine Ganymede's sophisticated administration services with LDAP for distribution.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
What the heck's wafting through the ether around here? Moderations are getting ludicrous. While you might not value this guy's opinion, he hardly linked to goatsex or anything. Some other posts in this thread also got modded Offtopic and Flamebait while being perfectly servicable posts.
-
First, yes I know that this is probably a troll. However, on the off chance that it isn't, I have these questions for the AC.
1) If the public protocol is leaky, why not develop their own, totally different & competing protocol?
2) If they did care about the public domain issues and improvement, why not submit their improvements to the standards body to have their "improvements" included?
3) Failing or separate from this, why not license out their "improvements" to other software vendors? They would still make money, right?
I think the truth is that while it is possible that MS may have made a few small improvements (doubtful, but possible), their real goal is to ensnare new customers and to dig existing ones even deeper. If you still disagree, I would appreciate hearing any lucid arguments.
We are actually using a product from Novell called DirXML to do exactly this. We are syncing RACF/Notes/NDS/(soon NT Domains) and peoplesoft with our "meta directory" (It's actually just NDS but we call it a meta directory). We are pretty early on in the project, but so far things are looking good.
Go to the CNN website and scroll down to the bottom of the page. Look over to the right. CNN uses eDirectory to track the stories you read, and then serve you custom content (and advertising) based on your apparent interests.
---------------------------------------------
SERENITY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Softerra's LDAP Administrator is pretty good, and they have a freeware version called LDAP Browser. The LDAP Browser/Editor is nice also.
If you are using LDAP as your addressbook, ldap-abook is a nice interface to add/delete/modify entries. Most email clients are LDAP-aware these days and it's convenient to be able to share an address book between my personal and work email accounts.
I've had to roll my own to do system accounts, however. Make ldapmodify your new best friend, or write an interface of your own - there is a lot of support for Perl or PHP LDAP functions out there. Server-side, I've used OpenLDAP and iPlanet's Directory Server, and I prefer iPlanet. iPlanet has a free non-commercial license option, is significantly faster than OpenLDAP, and has hooks to synchronize with an NT or Active Directory domain so you could do all the user administration in Windows and they would propagate over to your LDAP server.
Other fun things you can do with LDAP are:
Handle Unix authentication through pam_ldap
Hook into NIS with the NIS/LDAP gateway
Authenticate through apache with mod_auth_ldap or auth_ldap or Netegrity
Centralize your smtp routing data in LDAP for sendmail
Good luck.
Also, you might check out iDSRK from iPlanet. It's a set of performance testing tools, a tool for generating bulk loads, etc. Quite useful in some circumstances.
-jeff
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Links: Webmin & Freshmeat page for LDAP module (LDAP module site is in French but easy to grok);
http://freshmeat.net/projects/ldap_module
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
If you work for an Oracle shop, you can use Oracle Internet Directory LDAP, which is based on Oracle's Application Server product. Details here.
A quick plug for a useful LDAP-related tool I wrote: it's an LDAP to DSML (version 1.0) gateway, which allows you to read DSML (which is an XML-based language) out of, and write it to, any LDAP-enabled directory server.
:-)
It's not graphical, though
Find it here.
Gerv
I went the same way. I struggled with LDAP for weeks and eventually went back to NIS which does exactly what I need. The LDAP tools suck rocks at the moment... I virtually gave up trying to get samba to integrate with it (I actually ended up replacing 'passwd' with a shell script that modifed 3 different versions of the password!), and as far as getting Win2k to login through it forget it (it's hardcoded to active directory, basically).
I'm sure it's really good if you're trying to manage 50,000 users and a masochistic enough to like constantly editing ldif files but otherwise steer clear.
XML is a file format (or metaformat), not a directory service like LDAP. The two technologies are orthogonal.
They are related via DSML, and there's an open source suite of software that I wrote for working with directory information as XML here.
Gerv
Check out the LDAP module at CPAN. 'Course, if you don't already know Perl it will take you an hour or so to learn it, but I think you will find it to be the most flexible and powerful LDAP tool available.
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Actually, it takes some tweaking.
There is a poorly documented (gee, surprise surprise) option to add indexes (at least for the ldbm backend). Try putting
index cn,gn,sn,uid,objectclass,o,ou pres,eq,sub
in your database definition in SlapD. Note that you will need to rebuild the DB after that. I suggest exporting it to ldif (via 'ldbmcat -n > file.ldif' with slapd offline), delete the db, then reimport (via 'ldif2ldbm -i file.ldif') and restart slapd. You will notice a *SERIOUS* speed increase during search and a *SERIOUS* speed loss during the initial import. Unless you're doing tonnes of updates, you shouldn't have any speed issues with updating it, though.
I think Mauve has the most RAM. --PHB (Dilbert Comic)
Exactly. The links you've included (looks like good stuff by the way), definately show how LDAP and XML can be used well together.
They are mutually independant technologies. They can be used together to complement one another, but to talk about replacing XML with LDAP or LDAP with XML (as the previous poster did) is just plain silly.
LDAP and SQL are considerably different beasts for different purposes. What you propose is basically to say that screwdrivers make decent pry bars, so why ever buy a pry bar?
o n+ sql&selm=36AD06E4.F7362E47%40netscape.com&rnum=9
Here is some information comparing LDAP and SQL from the OpenLDAP FAQ:
http://www.openldap.org/faq/data/cache/378.html
And here is some from an old usenet post. It's specifically talking about why Netscape's LDAP server uses it's own database instead of a RDBMS, but it has lots of good information about how directory services and RDBMS's differ and why one does not make a good substitute for the other.
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=ldap+comparis
Fair enough on the first two, however...
.NET, or any other "improvement" or "innovation" of their for public use in Linux or FreeBSD or proprietary use in Unix or OSX. Their goal is still to lock in customers and stifle competition.
Would "gaining a business advantage first" do for a reason? Patent the improvements, refuse the license until you've gained a dominant market share and then release the innovation to the others. That's how business is done.
Microsoft has had a dominant business share for as long as I can remember. Furthermore, let me know when they license out Kerberos, Active Directory, ActiveX, ASP, DirectX, their Java extensions,
Arguably it is more of a "generic Unix" thing; and actually is pretty usable on a wider set of systems than that.
It's intended to store directory information that would be useful for all sorts of things in terms of system administration on Linux and similar systems; the poster certainly did mention tools widely used on Linux like useradd , userdel, usermod, passwd.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Novell doesnt have the desktop clout to ram it down everyone and their grandmothers throat wether they want it or not.
Sure, Novell would have the tech to do it, but hell, this is the IT industry, which isnt about technology. It's about Microsoft taxing you for 30% of your income for the rest of your life. Nothing else.
Its `a graphical browser for LDAP directories and schemas. Using GQ, an administrator can search through a directory and modify objects stored
in that directory'
It comes as Red Hat's standard LDAP admin tool. Get it here. Its not as good be, but neither is directory administrator the last time I looked.
Novell has a JDBC driver for LDAP. It maps SQL statements to LDAP(At least those it can. Those it can't map directly to LDAP it does it's own joining of the data). Its a free download available at developer.novell.com/ndk/ldapjdbc.htm Its also 'works with LDAP 2000' certified. (From the OpenGroup) This means it should work with any LDAP compliant directory. Its useful if you have normal reporting tools that use JDBC drivers. For example StarOffice can import data from JDBC drivers with a nice GUI - This way you don't have to know about the LDAP syntaxes or anything about LDAP except that its a Data Base. They also have an ODBC driver that only works with eDirectory(NDS). Hope that helps.
I think NIS is the best open source solution for Linux. NIS+ server code for Linux doesn't exist yet, but the client code does...
NIS+ is a truly elegant architecture, in many ways, what AD should have been. It's far superior to AD, LDAP, or any other X.500-derived directory - that ISO/OSI brain damage is just too deep to let X.500's ilk be easily used in the real world.
Unfortuantely, Sun really botched its attempt to get NIS+ accepted, for several very good reasons:
1) Although the directory itself was incredibly impressive, and worked very well, there were NO administrative tools usable by mere mortals. I was a "Network Ambassador" at Sun at the time NIS+ was attempting to make inroads, and I can tell you that even amongst that elite group, not 1 in 50 was capable of setting up and properly administering NIS+ in a configuration suitable for enterprise use. Some things were just impossible, like recovering from a lost root key: You just had to rebuild everything from scratch. Secure, but hardly practical. This inordiante complexity may well be why there's still no Linux NIS+ server (besides the fact that one would be pointless now...)
2) There was no good migration plan from NIS to NIS+, and no way to keep the two in sync: it was pretty much an all-or-nothing scenario, at least for the Unix boxes. Not surprisingly, lacking Microsoft's arm-twisting ability, all but a handful of Sun's customers chose to pass NIS+ by, no matter how good it was.
3) Sun tried hard, but didn't make adopting NIS+ sweet enough for IBM and HP, who at one time had "committed" to putting NIS+ into their Unix OSes. Unfortunately, the combination of NIS+ being perceived as "Sun's" and its underwhelming adoption even solid Sun accounts (due to reason #1 above) led to its not being considered a serious contender.
4) If you really know what you're doing, it's possible to build a hierarchical multi-domain name/directory service using NIS, although I only know of one company (a Fortune 20 former employer) that's ever actually put this in production enterprise-wide. All the capabilities are there, it's just that very few people bother to figure out how NIS really works. We eventually wound up replacing regular NIS with a security-enhanced superset NIS (and appropriately modified utilities) of our own design, where all appropriate changes at a higher level filtered down to the lower domains, and each domain only had to administer its own portion of the namespace.
Sad, but I'd say NIS+ is pretty much completely irrelevant now.
Microsoft and AD have won this battle so far, but it may once again be the unlikely knight Samba that will save the day and turn the tide. We'll see.
P.S.: Side note to comment 1 above: This is just one in a long line of times Sun has developed extremely impressive core architectures and failed in the marketplace. (NIS+, SunNet Manager, Jini, Jiro, and even Java itself, to some degree...) The fallacious assumption is that the elegant core is all that's required, and that dealing with pesky details like administration, management, or writing apps that take advantage of the elegant plumbing can be left as an excercise for the customer, not something worthy of Sun's time and attention. When will they learn?!
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
have you ever worked w/ Novell? i mean, when I first started looking at AD in w2k I said, oh, cool, they've finally got a directory service. right click, tabs, no problem. but the further I get into the w2k directory the more murky and entangled it gets. w2k directory is *not* a breeze if you're doing anything more than administering your home network, it, like other ms stuff, is more rube goldberg than anything.
... smoother.
OK Novell isn't a breeze either but they were doing it when MS thought windows 3.1 for workgroups was a server archetecture - it's
oh and documented? don't make me laugh. half thier documentation is marketing materials and the other half is incomplete. Please don't mod this up for being anti-microsoft (i still work w/ ms every day, hell, i'm writing this off w2k server w/ ie), I just had to say that the w2k ad is way more wack than this poster seems to think.
closed minded is as closed minded does
and
<br>
are
your
friends.
Get
to
know
them.
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
LDAP is a large part of my job, I've written dozens of scripts for handling various LDAP chores. And whatever you do I strongly recommend that as much as possible for any scripting, use something like Net::LDAP instead of using or wraping shell scripts around any of the OpenLDAP utils. Maybe it's just a project maturity thing or something, but the OpenLDAP people seem to have an infuriating habit of changing the behaviour/output of ldapsearch which means you will end up having to tweak or rewrite every script that uses it if you ever upgrade. That said the OpenLDAP utils are quite handy to have around, no matter which implementation you're running as your actual LDAP servers.
Also if you're running iPlanet/Netscape's directory server grab their resource kit, the ilash util which can do a lot of things, has a really nice feature in that you can drop an entry into vi and edit it. ud or whatever it's called in the OpenLDAP utils can sort of do that, but only for certain hardcoded attributes, and not the ones you're likely to need either.
LDAP has become a very important tool at our facility. We have a mixed Windows 2000 and *NIX environment with AD and OpenLDAP directories. Our sister corporation has one of the fastest clustered Alpha systems in the world and they used it to map the Human Genome. Our business unit was created to embark on an even greater technological and medical endeavour. The regular user community is comfortable with Windows so we give them that. However, we rely only on *NIX for anything mission critical or requiring stable computing power. We have installed OpenLDAP to take care of everything outside of Windows. The following OSs authenticate (or will) from OpenLDAP: Slackware, Redhat, TRU64, Solaris, AIX, Nortel, etc. This gives us a single user/password for the users of any of those systems. In addition, I have coded over the following software to authenticate against LDAP:
IRMA 0.8 http://irma.incubus.de/
IRM 1.3.3 http://irm.schoenefeld.org/
Document Manager http://www.rot13.org/~dpavlin/docman.html
The following software already takes advantage of of LDAP:
Horde/IMP 2.0/3.0 http://www.horde.org
QMAIL http://www.qmail.org
Rolodap
A very good LDAP useradd, passwd change, etc. Java tool:
Java LDAP Browser V 2.8.2 http://www.iit.edu/~gawojar/ldap
http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~gawor/ldap
You can also use IRMA for user/group management. We initially started with IRM, but we are moving over to IRMA since it is very clean code and easy to extend.
We use Netscape Communicator 4.79 Roaming profiles so that users that move between Windows and *NIX can have their bookmarks, address book, etc. readily available. Don't use the mull.schema because it has a couple of errors. I will be posting the correct schema at http://www.igranite.com in a couple of weeks (the domain doesn't point anywhere at the moment) as well as more LDAP info. You may search IMP mailing lists for the latest schema I posted.
A project we would like to see started is LDAP Gina. I have no programming experience in Windows, so it would be great to have a community knowledgeable in both *NIX and Windows create an LDAP Gina. I found a NIS gina which could possibly be extended to LDAP?
As many corporate orgs are probably finding out, the GNU, GPL, and Linux community are producing high caliber software and solutions for corporate use. Linux is fast becoming the center of desktop use, already solidly beating back an attempt by Windows to break into the corporate *NIX environment. Having lost the server fight, no wonder why a MS memo ordered a clobbering of Linux.
Could you have ever changed the code like we did using commercial software / OSs? And we will be uploading our changes to the respective authors to make the software that much better.
check
I found this thing sometime and it rocked. Great set of VBscripts for AD stuff http://www.people.virginia.edu/~pjh5u/code/adsi_ap p.txt
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Great! What about Kerberos & Active Directory???
There are plenty of sites with info about what LDAP is. Do a search on yahoo.com, dmoz.org, or google.com and you'll find plenty of sites. Basically, it is a standard, high-level network protocol (like http, ftp or ssh), that allows you to access directory servers. A directory server is basically a database that is organized hierarchicaly(sp?) and is optimized for a lot of reads and very few writes. They are useful, for example, for running address book servers (Outlook or Netscape, and presumably other email clients) can use an LDAP server for looking up email addresses given a nickname, or a full name of a person, or even a partial name that is unique.
Another purpose that they are sometimes used for is to implement network authentication services, similar to the way Novell or Win2K server allow you to log into any workstation on your company's/organization's network using a network account. Your login account, instead of being created on individual workstations, is created in the LDAP directory and when you go to login to a workstation, the workstation requests authentication from the directory server.
I'm sure there are other uses for LDAP directory servers as well, but these are the two most common. Cheers.
No, I wish I was very young, but that isn't so. I was exaggerating a bit when I said that.
However, I don't remeber anyone cheering for IE at first. Most of the people I knew either said "Why the hell is MS making a browser? (and giving it away for free - hmmm...)" or "Man, that IE is a real piece of crap, I'll stick with [Netscape, Mosaic, Spyglass, Chameleon Web Surfer, etc...]."