What is LDAP?

What is LDAP?

LDAP means leightweight directory access protocol. In other words is is a easy method to access a "directory". And a directory are hirarchical structured data like the data in a DNS server. There are some LDAP server products out there. Netscape directory server, Novell's directory server and Microsoft Active Directory are some flavours. We use OpenLDAP, a open source LDAP server here. So you should install the "openldap2" packet. As usual you can see with
rpm -qa |grep openldap2
if you have the rpm installed and with
rpm -ql openlda2
what files are installed. Activate the init-scripts so that the ldap server can start at boot time. You can check if it is running with
ps -ef |grep slapd
since the server process is called "slapd"

So what do we use it for? We want to have central administration. That means, we want to have a central repository for our users. We don't want to distribute /etc/passwd and /etc/group files to all our machines. We will use LDAP as a central repository.

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