Description

LDAP is an acronym for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol; it is a simplified version of the X.500 protocol. It’s lean mean and powerful with capability to support current exponential increased internet traffic, electronic commerce and time-critical content on the web. The LDAP directory setup in this training manual will be used for: authentication, shared directory (for mail clients), address book, etc.

Today, LDAP directories and LDAP authentication have become one of the enterprise user infrastructure cornerstones. As the enterprise has digitized and opened itself up to customer, business partner, vendor and wide-spread employee access to pieces of most enterprise applications, the need to know who the user is has significantly increased from a security perspective. Who is the user trying to access an application? What is the strength of authentication by which the application can trust the user trying to access the application? What are the user's authorization privileges?

That is, a enterprise-wide LDAP implementation can enable almost any application, running on almost any computer platform, to obtain information from your LDAP directory. And that directory can be used to store a broad range of data: email address and mail routing information, HR data, public security keys, contact lists, and much more. By making an LDAP directory a focal point in your systems integration, you're providing one-stop shopping whenever people go looking for information within your company - even if the primary source of the data lives elsewhere – i.e., they sign in once – via Single-Sign-On (SSO) – and thereafter they have access to all LDAP linked services. In this training manual HowTo, we’ll plan, design, implement & deploy OpenLDAP server and OpenLDAP on separate Linux CentOS5.