OpenLDAP
OpenLDAP
Posted Aug 12, 2009 4:15 UTC (Wed) by TRS-80 (guest, #1804)In reply to: Ubuntu's multisearch surprise by drag
Parent article: Ubuntu's multisearch surprise
People have, in the past, had huge issues learning LDAP with OpenLDAP. There is a wealth of documentation and examples on LDAP, but very little actually covers the initial setup and deployment of OpenLDAP. When you install OpenLDAP from Debian and Fedora it's built correctly, but it's a blank canvas...The Debian packages these days actually provide a base entry and admin in the database, although this isn't well documented and requires a purge to do it again if you mess up. There are a few documents that properly cover setup, like Debian GNU: Setting up OpenLDAP although that assumes you'll use Kerberos instead of SSL to protect passwords, and my own LDAP for the Lazy Sysadmin which aims to be useful, if a bit ranty. But yes, most LDAP documentation assumes you already know LDAP and is more of a reference, or is just cargo-cult "do this to make it work" with no insight in to what's going on and how to fix it when it breaks.So users will read the documentation and want to experiment with OpenLDAP, but the initial setup to get a actual working example is a very high barrier and they get confused and dismayed and usually give up.
So if they were given a nice default setup, even if it wasn't what they needed ultimately then it makes things MUCH easier to learn and deploy and would increase the value of the software by a large amount.