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USENIX Technical Program - Abstract - USENIX Annual
Conference, Freenix Session - June 2000
Extending Internet Services Via LDAP
James E. Dutton, Southern Illinois University
Abstract
This project report examines the use of an LDAP (Lightweight Directory
Access Protocol) V2 server to provide an easily accessible data storage
facility. The main purpose of the LDAP database is to store related
information based on a common thread such as a person's name, an
organization's name, or the description of a service offered, in a
simple yet hierarchical structure.
The use of LDAP enables new fields to be added to existing user
information to 1) enable end-users to store pertinent user information
to be used by a mainframe-to-PC intermediary file server using Samba, 2)
enable new groupings of electronic mail distributions to be created with
little or no change to Sendmail, and 3) enhance the granularity of
InterNetworkNews (Usenet) article submission acceptance capabilities.
Some additional benefits of these facilities included using a single,
non-proprietary database which required very little new coding to make
use of. The data used for the various facilities were easily associated
with database objects defined for enterprise personnel. The
administration load for each service was reduced since service related
data, such as userids or mailboxes, were not maintained directly as a
part of the specific service. The Internet Directory Service, as
provided by the LDAP server, is accessible by several methods, rather
than just one specialized or proprietary interface.
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