Be more productive and make your life easier. That's what LDAP System Administration is all about. System administrators often spend a great deal of time managing configuration information located on many different machines: usernames, passwords, printer configurations, email client configurations, and network filesystem configurations, to name a few. LDAPv3 provides tools for centralizing all of the configuration information and placing it under your control. Rather than maintaining several administrative databases (NIS, Active Directory, Samba, and NFS configuration files), you can make changes in only one place and have all your systems immediately "see" the updated information. Practically platform independent, this book uses the widely available, open source OpenLDAP 2 directory server as a premise for examples, showing you how to use it to help you manage your configuration information effectively and securely. OpenLDAP 2 ships with most Linux® distributions and Mac OS® X, and can be easily downloaded for most Unix-based systems. After introducing the workings of a directory service and the LDAP protocol, all aspects of building and installing OpenLDAP, plus key ancillary packages like SASL and OpenSSL, this book discusses:

• Configuration and access control

• Distributed directories; replication and referral

• Using OpenLDAP to replace NIS

• Using OpenLDAP to manage email configurations

• Using LDAP for abstraction with FTP and HTTP servers, Samba, and Radius

• Interoperating with different LDAP servers, including Active Directory

• Programming using Net::LDAP

If you want to be a master of your domain, LDAP System Administration will help you get up and running quickly regardless of which LDAP version you use. After reading this book, even with no previous LDAP experience, you'll be able to integrate a directory server into essential network services such as mail, DNS, HTTP, and SMB/CIFS.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 21 Ratings

Pretty good stuff - 2007-09-20
Reviewer Rating:
I'm happy with this book. It's a little out of date and the details are getting a bit, shall we say, "off". However, it is a much better set of documentation that rummaging through the RFCs and paltry OpenLDAP README content :)

A book well worth its price - 2007-07-21
Reviewer Rating:
This book is written a while ago and it definitely needs update. It frequently refers to RFCs and states "blah blah is not yet accepted as standard" but probably it is accepted as one by now.

The organization of this book is a little chaotic. When I read it from the chapter 1, introduction, it was still not clear what I was getting into. After reading it all, I still think the introduction was not very helpful. I don't think reading this book from cover to cover all through would help a lot.

Nonetheless, after reading through this book with actual practice (installing OpenLDAP and running the examples as the book illustrated), I got good grasp of the concepts of LDAP and understanding how it works.

I like its practical examples and connection to other applications.

In conclusion, I feel I spent my money well on this book.

Not what I had hoped for - 2008-07-04
Reviewer Rating:
Although it spends a lot of time talking about OpenLDAP, the version is covers is outdated. I would also have hoped to find more information about how to choose which schema's. The email section does not mention the different attempts at standardizing a schema.

Book is dated - 2008-03-09
Reviewer Rating:
I am giving this 3 stars because it does a fair job of explaining basic LDAP structure. It does a fairly good job on administration of just LDAP but LDAP is usually used as a base upon which other applications rely upon.

If you are trying to integrate something with LDAP, as I was, then this is not the book for that. Also, this book is a little dated as it does not cover openLDAP 2.4. SLURPD is no longer used for replication in the latest openLDAP 2.4 releases...

The author does make an attempt at application integration but does an extremely poor job of it. For example, on the topic of Replacing NIS there is absolutely no mention of NSCD (Name Server Caching Daemon) which is included on every major Linux distribution. If you are integrating Samba with openLDAP, then it's crucial that you understand how NSCD works as it can cause Samba to break yet all the Linux tool-sets continue working.

If you have this book, then on page 113, the author talks about optimizing nss_ldap searches which is good. But later in the book on page 168 on the topic of Samba integration, there is no mention of the fact that you may, and most likely, need to revisit the contents of page 113 again. Samba and associated tools, by default, create a Computers container to hold computer accounts. If you implemented the searches as described on page-113 alone, you find you can not join workstations to a samba domain unless you also include a line that reads:

nss_base_passwd ou=computers,dc=plainjoe,dc=org?one

I sense that some attention to detail is lost considering the 2nd half of the book is on application integration and things like I just explained are left out. I suppose one could argue that you should have learned this after reading page 113 but it would have saved me some time if it was mentioned...

I would recommend this book as a companion to other openLDAP books that do a better job of covering application integration. I give this 3 stars because the Active Directory coverage and reference seems pretty good and the coverage of .conf file settings seems good.

O'reilly books are the best - 2007-01-09
Reviewer Rating:
Another great O'reilly book. O'reilly, IMHO are the best technical books.

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