Re: LDAP question

["Jonathan F. Dill" <dill umbi umd edu>]

Hi Tom,

I am pretty much in the same boat.  I picked up a huge tome
"Understanding and Deploying Ldap Directory Services" by Tim Howes
et.al. from amazon.com--it's like reading the arcane history and theory
of how motorcycles work when all I want to do is go out and RIDE the
motorcycle (to borrow a metaphor from Northern Exposure).

I have been using NIS and NIS+ for 5 years or so and would now like to
migrate to LDAP.  What would be  really useful would be a migration
guide from NIS/NIS+ to LDAP plus some migration tools, but I haven't
found anything comprehensive yet.  Granted, I should know the "right"
way to establish the LDAP directory heirarchies, but I don't have hours
and hours to read through a huge tome before I get to work on it.

LDAP can provide some of the same functionalities as NIS and NIS+, but
the philosophy and organization seem very different to me.  The main
thing I'm interested in is to be able to define new accounts in a single
place, namely the LDAP directory, instead of having to create separate
accounts for Unix, Windows, and e-mail.

Tom Diehl wrote:
> Can someone point me at some plain english (not the RFCs) for ldap. I am
> looking for examples on just what you can do with this thing. So far the only
> thing I found is some sparce documentation on using it with nss_ldap.
> I am looking for examples if they exist. If I understand this it looks
> like a replacment for nis or nis+ but I have a feeling it can do more.
> Am I correct or totally off base?

-- 
"Jonathan F. Dill" (jfdill@jfdill.suite.net)