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What Else Is There Besides OpenLDAP?
The Stunted Leech asks: "I am trying to develop an LDAP interface to an existing customer database and would like to implement a simple LDAP listener that could be queried from e-mail clients. Before everyone suggests importing the data to OpenLDAP or developing a back-end for it, let me just say that it isn't very feasible: I'm the only person assigned to the project, and my company doesn't have the time or hardware resources to maintain an LDAP server. So I'm looking for very simple implementations of LDAP servers, preferably in a scripting language like Perl or Python (we use Perl for CGIs and wxPython for GUI front-ends). I've come across a couple of Java-based ones, but they seemed overly complex - all I need to do is retrieve a contact's e-mail or phone number from our database. Pointers to any sort of simple LDAP servers are welcome, even if they do little more than return the same result to all queries."
In any case, even Perl's too much for you - why would you write your own gateway when the vast majority of the work has been done for you? I wonder why OpenLDAP is something that you don't want? Resource-wise, unless you're handling a _lot_ of clients or a really pathological schema behind it, you shouldn't have any problems. In terms of administration, it really does mostly run itself. Setup the initial gateway, and you're done, other than having one more service to watch.
I don't know of any simpler solutions, other than "don't use it, then". Maybe I'm misunderstanding.
I do know a lot of people break out into hives when confronted with LDAP. Most of those people don't have much of a background in the theory behind it. I seriously don't mean this as a put-down - I don't have a formal background in the theory, either. All I mean is that it really isn't all that scary once you start doing it. Again, maybe I'm missing the problem.
Hope this does someone some good.
I forget what 8 was for.
There is always TinyLDAP from Felix "SMTP is not
simple, LDAP is not light-weight, wtf?" von Leitner.
He doesn't want to implement read/write access at
the moment though, unless you provide code to him
which does that in 600 KB.
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
Well, some applications of it (LDAP for user management) anyway, but that's a subject for a different rant.
Well, I for one would like to hear your rant. Since I found about LDAP, I personnally come to believe that it is the best thing since sliced bread for user management. I am currently building a mail farm that does all it's user authentication and information lookup (aliases, etc) to an Active Directory via LDAP. Also, NIS being what it is, LDAP is pretty much the only single-sign-on scheme that is well supported in Linux.
:wq
Why not put LDAP on an existing server? We tossed it onto our pre-existing apache/PHP/pgsql server, and it only takes up about 100 Megs or so of memory total after it's been up for a day or two (mostly for buffers of course.)
While our load numbers went up, they didn't shoot through the roof or anything.
LDAP tends to be a pretty small load for us. If we weren't providing authentication for a non-buffering external server (*COUGH people soft *COUGH) it's be no real load at all. As it is, providing a dozen or so logins a second, it's still only about 0.2 load factor or so on the box.
Any old PII-450 with 256 Meg of ram could handle OpenLDAP quite well.
--- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
Dude, there's a perl and shell backend in OpenLDAP. No database, no storage, you just get your shell or perl script invoked on every request.
What more could you possibly want?
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));