[Fedora-directory-devel] Re: Problems creating a Samba4 LDAP Backend

Andrew Morgan morgan at orst.edu
Fri Mar 21 23:17:17 UTC 2008


On Sat, 22 Mar 2008, Luke Howard wrote:

>>>>> 
>>> To me, this says that the directory does an internal group search to
>>> generate the isMemberOf attribute on the fly.  I believe this is the way
>>> Active Directory handles the memberOf attribute as well.
>> 
>> IIRC in AD memberOf is a linked attribute, stored permanently.
>
>
> From memory, AD stores the entry IDs of the link tuples in a separate table, 
> so both "member" and "memberOf" are ostensibly generated on the fly. But this 
> is really an implementation decision (although things do start to get 
> interesting when dealing with references across partition boundaries).

I noticed that the memberOf tab in AD Users and Computers does not show 
group membership for groups that are not in the same domain as the user. 
Access controls were still correctly applied though, so those interfaces 
must be enumerating group membership some other way.

I've always viewed the memberOf attribute as a convenient tool for human 
use, but not something I would use programmatically.  All the benefits 
provided by memberOf can be attained other ways by the LDAP client, 
although the LDAP client may need to know more about the directory 
structure to do it.

 	Andy




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