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?"

RIT

[Apreche]

At the Rochester Institute of Technology (www.rit.edu) where I am a current student we have a very nice LDAP directory. It contains info on all the people here. I use it all the time when people give me their e-mail addresses in order to find their phone numbers. It's extremely handy. I don't know how they set it up or what they use, but it has a web interface.

Check out Microsoft's tools

[fawadhalim]

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 know what you mean.

[Rick_Clark]

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

Isn't Active Directory an LDAP implementation?

[Bistronaut]

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?

Well check this out

[Anonymous Coward]

A vaporware? [sourceforge.net]
LinPlanet [sourceforge.net]

my preferred LDAP browser

[Doktor Memory]

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 [ldapadministrator.com], 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.

Windos tools

[alen]

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.

AD

[ViceClown]

Yeah, it's called Active Directory. It's well documented and it's easy as hell to use. This isn't meant to be flaim bait - it's just the way it is. I havne't found too many good LDAP tools either. Working with Active Directory, however, is a breeze. Just my $0.02

Re:Check out Microsoft's tools

[Craig Davison]

In Windows, LDAP browser [ldapbrowser.com] is a good tool. It even shows you 'hidden' password attributes that get obfuscated by the Microsoft tools.

AFAIK, it supports LDAPv2, LDAPv3 and Active Directory. It supports most all SASL mechanisms, even NTLM when necessary.

IBM LDAP Client

[dgenr8]

Go looking for the IBM SecureWay Directory Management Tool (DMT). It's a Java LDAP client that lets you edit the directory manually.

Not a big industry player?

[Wolfger]

Daimler Chrysler is using Novell/LDAP. Sounds like big industry to me...

My Favorite tools

[Daeslin]

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).

Anything but OpenLDAP

[Pegasus]

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.

Java based browser/editor

[SweetCyanide]

I like Jarek Gawor's Java based editor:
http://www.iit.edu/~gawojar/ldap/index.html

What about "Directory Administrator"?

[DocSnyder]

Directory Administrator [open-it.org] 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.

This has been a huge problem for us as well

[Casshan]

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 [faqs.org]

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 /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 [padl.com] 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..

ever hear of Freshmeat?

[Kazin]

I implemented LDAP at a dot-bomb company I worked for in late 2000, and had NO PROBLEM finding tools. I was using a nice Gtk user manager, and had my mail server (and all the mail clients) looking up users in the LDAP server. All the tools I used I found on Freshmeat. Maybe try searching the web?

Some things you can use

[crowke]

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 [snark-soft.com] 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.

Openldap mailing lists

[Anonymous Coward]

Your questions appear perrenially on the openldap mailing lists. You might want to look in the archives:

http://www.openldap.org/lists/

Personally I've used LDAPExplorer, a php based
viewer/editor. It works OK, but is not without its flaws. (Supports php 4.06 only, no longer maintained, sessions are intermittent) Since its GPL'd one could have some fun improving it.

I'm a river of knowledge to my people

[foofboy]

Use it wisely [open-it.org]

Re:Uhh.... what's LDAP?

[SweetCyanide]

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol

Acronym lookup dictionay for your reference:
http://www.ucc.ie/info/net/acronyms/acro.html

Re:Uhh.... what's LDAP?

[Jahf]

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.

Re:Uhh.... what's LDAP?

[crowke]

RFC 2251 [rfc.net]:
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (v3)

This protocol is specifically targeted at management applications and browser applications that provide read/write interactive access to directories.

Re:Directories are dead in the water

[AndyDeck]

I've got to disagree with your assesment that Novell is not a key industry player. Novell's eDirectory [novell.com] 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.

linux/unix LDAP user tools

[Paul Jakma]

checkout:

[open-it.org]
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 [biot.com] 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 [padl.com] migration scripts are very informative. These are included with the OpenLDAP distribution.

Re:LDAP Admin Tools

[mbf]

Also on freshmeat:

http://freshmeat.net/projects/ldapexplorer/

It's a package in debian testing/unstable as well.

There's a gnome client called GQ LDAP Client which is a bit shaky, but works well once set up correctly.

A little shell/perl scripting should get you all the useradd tools you need. I've dome just that for a simple ldap-backed postfix/courier pop/imap mail server.

I intend to extend the tools for use in an ldap-authenticated samba PDC as well giving a one-stop non-MS infrastructure.

mbf.

LDAP is quite useful where I am

[hysterik]

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.

Novell's been "going out of business" for years...

[itwerx]

TSIA.
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 [novell.com] for Linux! (Registration required).

Hey, whad'ya know, I see that /. is filtering out the quotes in the link.

Here it is again in plain text for your cut'n'pasting pleasure:
https://download.novell.com/ICSLogin/?"http://do wn load.novell.com/download.jsp?cat=NDS&pid=646&targe t=sdExpLic.jsp"

Re:Not a big industry player?

[CounterZer0]

Guess what powers Yahoo? Novell eDirectory (LDAP). Novell doesn't do much marketing, and they admittedly haven't been 'gaining' much market share, but they have some die hard fans, and some of those fans are BIG business. It's because LDAP makes a network so much easier to run. eDirectory provides a convient way to manage EVERYTHING on your network. And it supports multiple platforms!

Re:my preferred LDAP browser

[downwa]

For a gtk+ GUI LDAP brwoser, gq (http://biot.com/gq/ [biot.com]) would probably be what you want.

For a command-line add/modify/delete utility, here's one I created:

http://pushan.integritysi.com/down/ldapuser [integritysi.com]

LDAP Admin Help

[medcalf]

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

Re:Isn't Active Directory an LDAP implementation?

[isomeme]

Slap me with a strongly worded post if I am incorrect, but isn't Active Directory an LDAP implementation?

Yes, it is -- among other things. Remember that LDAP is just an interface spec; it says nothing about underlying representation. Just as XML may be used to report the contents of a database or the results from a calculation or any other data source, LDAP provides a generic front-end on any vaguely tree-like directory services provider. Thereore, Microsoft ADSI offers an LDAP interface along with several proprietary interfaces for use in querying and modifying the underlying directory store.

To their credit, the Microsoft ADSI LDAP implementation is remarkably standards-compliant. I developed an app which authenticated users against OpenLDAP, and extended it to support ADSI as well with minimal effort (mostly involving generalization of assumptions about directory layout, rather than interface changes per se).

Just saw this on a mailing list:

[Teancom]

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
[e-mail]

So, it's "pre-beta" but has that ever stopped a true free software geek before? ;-)

Novell has some pretty cool LDAP tools!

[thehunger]

Novell's eDirectory is the fastest, most scalable & reliable LDAP directory around, runs on NetWare, Windows, Solaris, Linux, Tru64 Unix and AiX, and comes with some pretty cool LDAP tools.

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 [novell.com]. You'll find LDAP class libraries, tools etc.

The evaluation copy of eDirectory can be found here [novell.com] and includes the tools mentioned.

LDAP, Tools, Servers et al

[JABOFH]

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)

A few tools

[Ludoo]

maybe there are some duplicates with the above posts
Object Identifiers

• • [OIDs Registry] [alvestrand.no]

Schema Browsers

• • [Softerra LDAP Browser] [ldapadministrator.com]
  • [Java LDAP browser/editor] [iit.edu]

Language Libraries

• • [LDAP client API for Python] [sourceforge.net]

Exchange Schema

• • [Directory Schema Contents] [microsoft.com]

Re:This has been a huge problem for us as well

[maitas]

Yor biggest problem is the idea of using Active Directory.
I've integrated myself several Windows, Linux and Solaris boxes under iPlanet Directory Server (which by the way, is free up to 200.000 directory entries).
The problem arise when you try to use Microsoft propietary LDAP (aka Active Directory). Just throw Active Direcotry away. Download for free Solaris 8 for Intel, download the latest LDAP Directory Server for Solaris Intel from iPlanet home page, and you will get plenty of docs from within iPlanet's site, and even Sun site. You can even call your Sun SE and get him to find all the documentation needed to integrate a Windows, Linux Solaris enviroment.
Realllllyyyyy ease!!

LDAP tools? Open Source tools are here!

[jlittle]

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...

Re:Active Directory

[L0rdJedi]

Huh?! DHCP is a Microsoft technology?! I think this [ietf.org] was in place before Microsoft started using it.

Ganymede, an LDAP manager / alternative

[jonabbey]

Well, I'll post a pointer to Ganymede [utexas.edu], 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 [rhoen.de] utility, you could combine Ganymede's sophisticated administration services with LDAP for distribution.

Re:Anything but OpenLDAP

[Anonymous Coward]

We at the University of Texas have been using OpenLDAP for years and are very pleased. We're running 1.X for a 70K entries public white pages service that handles ~100K queries a day without a hickup. There are a number of other private 1.X services ~100K entries, but not heavly used. We also have 2.X running a private photo directory with ~120K entries holding ~500K photos for IDs and photo course rosters (~7GB id2entry.dbb -- kinda stresses various Linux utilities).

We populate the directories live, but some complexities with our own record keeping requires a bulk reload weekly -- so the daemons are restarted at least once a week.

The Secret OpenLDAP Speed Boost

[KagatoLNX]

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.

Re:From a purely simplistic view, LDAP is pointles

[DeathBunny]

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?

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+compariso n+ sql&selm=36AD06E4.F7362E47%40netscape.com&rnum=9

Re:Anything but OpenLDAP

[smutt]

My organization chose OpenLDAP after doing extensive testing with IPlanet and DC Directory. We measure the size of our deployments in the 10's of thousands of users. I'm talking big honking SUN boxes with fiber channel, Gig-E and SAN's. I've found OpenLDAP(configured properly) stable and easily scalable. It's not the easiest thing in the world to setup, but at least it behaves deterministically and scales.

GQ is also worth a look

[Nailer]

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 [biot.com]. Its not as good be, but neither is directory administrator the last time I looked.

Re:Isn't Active Directory an LDAP implementation?

[abartlet]

Incorrect. Microsoft's LDAP server supports SASL binds - in particular it supports GSSAPI. This is the feature Samba 3.0 (currently in alpha) is using to authenticate to an AD installation.

Its actually quite sane - and the problems we have had in developing with it have not be AD, its been the unix client tools making assumptions about a functioning DNS (hint: it doesn't exist on MS networks).

But with a few config file tweaks its perfectly practical to kinit to your AD KDC and use that for a secure authenticaion! (In the end Tridge rewrote our own mini implemenation of the required peices to work around the buggy SASL libs).

Andrew Bartlett,
Samba Team

LDAP Software

[bbaez4]

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

Re:Isn't Active Directory an LDAP implementation?

[thehunger]

Here are some major real-world problems with AD:

• It's Windows-only. It does nothing for Windows NT, 9x, Linux, Solaris workstations.
• When you install it, it disables all disk caching on the server to prevent corruption, affecting overall server performance by 50%
• It requires changes to your DNS infrastructure and can crash existing DNS servers
• Groups aren't scalable, supporting max 5000 users
• You cannot grant rights at the OU level
• You can't rename domains or merge trees
• There's no remote management. No web based management.
• For AD repairs, you have to be physically present at the server, reboot it into a special repair mode, log in with the non-AD credentials you used when you installed the server (if you remember them!), try to repair, and then reboot and bring the server up in normal mode. If the problem still isn't fixed, you must repeat the process. Talk about downtime!
• AD doesn't have true inheritance, which means that granting a Password Admin type user rights to reset every user's password can take forever.
• Similarly, granting rights to a file system also takes forever because OU's cannot be granted rights to files and directories
• AD is -very- resource intensive. Simple operations can take hours, and the database grows almost exponentially. Granting rights to a user to administer e-mail addresses for 5000 users will grow the database by 13 megs!