LDAP be killing me. I need a good step by step

Craig White craigwhite at azapple.com
Thu Jan 10 05:33:05 UTC 2008


On Thu, 2008-01-10 at 15:30 +1030, Tim wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 19:53 -0700, Craig White wrote:
> > do this...
> > 
> > # rpm -ql evolution-data-server|grep schema 
> 
> Now, Thunderbird, Kmail, and the other main and popular mail clients
> that come supplied with Fedora...  You do know what I meant by
> "Evolution, *et* *al*"?
----
since the beginning of Netscape and Netscape directory server, pinning
the MozillaOrgPerson schema down has been equivalent to nailing jello to
the wall or getting the RIAA to admit that it's legal to rip CD's to
your hard drive. I think the best concept with Mozilla address books,
since they are read only anyway, is just to ignore the schema. Others
can differ and I'm good with that.

I did the google thing for kaddressbook and couldn't find anything
definitive. It can't be Fedora's issue for not supplying either of them.
----
> Can they all "just start working" with your LDAP server, or not?  The
> answer will be "no," won't it.  Otherwise none of us would have been
> having this discussion.
----
sure they work just fine without adding any schema, so your supposition
is wrong. The devil, as always, is in the details.

For example, I will use Evolution since that is the client I primarily
use myself. I note that you are also using the same version as I (must
be F7 - Evolution 2.10.3)

Click 'Contacts' => 'New'

you get a nice screen with 3 tabs
Contact | Personal Information | Mailing Address

On the Contact screen, you can put in name, email, telephone number but
if you put anything into say the categories or the instant messaging
field, or most of the fields represented on the Personal Information or
Mailing Address tabs you will get an error when you try to save on an
LDAP server that doesn't support those attributes. The schema solves
that issue.

Then there's the mapping issue...it's entirely possible that Evolution
will map to an attribute that Kaddressbook will miss and vice versa.
This becomes a much larger problem when you consider that everyone's
concept of extended attributes (i.e. custom schema) is no longer
compatible with each other. So some LDAP clients permit custom mapping
but now you are manually mapping attributes - see my link in other
e-mail with information on combined Outlook/Mozilla LDAP clients.

They all work as read clients, some work as write clients but if you
expect that you can get an LDAP address book working with various
clients without actually knowing what you are doing, I say good luck.

In the end, you'll likely find that e-mail client address books aren't
really good client applications for editing LDAP entries or creating new
ones. Typically those are custom applications written in things like PHP
or Ruby or perl. Tain't much different in Windows world.

Craig




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