Uses For Ldap - Red Hat LINUX 7.2 Reference Manual

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Other LDAP benefits include its ease of implementation (compared to X.500) and its well-defined Ap-
plication Programming Interface (API), which means that the number of LDAP-enabled applications
and LDAP gateways should increase in the future.
On the negative side, if you want to use LDAP, you will need LDAP-enabled applications or the ability
to use LDAP gateways. While LDAP usage should only increase, currently there are not very many
LDAP-enabled applications available for Linux. Also, while LDAP does support some access control,
it does not possess as many security features as X.500.

15.3 Uses for LDAP

Several Netscape applications, including web browsers using the Netscape Roaming Access feature,
are LDAP-enabled. Sendmail can use LDAP to look up addresses. Your organization can use LDAP
as an organization-wide directory and/or name service (in place of NIS or flat files). You can even use
a personal LDAP server to keep track of your own email address book (see Section 15.11, Additional
Resources).
Since LDAP is an open and configurable protocol, it can be used to store almost any type of informa-
tion relating to a particular organizational structure.
15.3.1 LDAP Applications
Several LDAP client applications are available that greatly simplify viewing and changing LDAP in-
formation:
LDAP Browser/Editor — A user-friendly tool written in 100% Java for easy deployment across
•
different platforms, available at http://www.iit.edu/~gawojar/ldap
GQ — A GTK-based LDAP client, available with the Red Hat Linux 7.2 distribution or at
•
http://biot.com/gq
• kldap — An LDAP client for the KDE Project, available at http://www.mountpoint.ch/oliver/kl-
dap
15.3.2 LDAP and PAM
LDAP can be used as an authentication service via the pam_ldap module. LDAP is commonly used
as a central authentication server so that users have a unified login that covers console logins, POP
servers, IMAP servers, machines connected to the network using Samba, and even Windows NT/2000
machines. Using LDAP, all of these login situations can rely on the same user ID and password com-
bination, greatly simplifying administration. The pam_ldap module is provided in the nss_ldap
package.
Chapter 15:Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)