[ILUG] ldap vs. nis...

[Fergus Donohue]

Can't tell you whether it's worth it for you, but it is very useful. The
other sorts of things you can do with it are:

1). Authentication to Apache with auth_ldap.
2). Authentication to Squid
3). Samba (with loads of caveats).
4). Replace phone books.
5). Easy access control if using the "host" attribute and filters.
6). Most of the better mailservers will use an LDAP server for
authentication
6). Other apps that talk to LDAP (depends on situation).

It allows you to scale (if that's a concern), multiple mail/web/whatever
servers all talking to the same distributed data source. It's extensible
and very much in vogue, so over time when other apps come out that need
LDAP you'll know all about it, update your schema and add the Aux
classes. 

Some highly recommended reading if you are going to look at it is:
"Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services" by Howes et al.

Regards,

Fergus.




kevin lyda wrote:
> 
> ok, i've set up nis (and even nis+, shudder), but never ldap.  my main
> usage for nis has been to ease admin of accounts - add a user to one
> box, make and bam, yer done.  never really used it for automount maps,
> hosts (uh, hello, dns?) or the rest of the crowd in /etc.
> 
> with less then a dozen boxes is it worth it to use ldap?  what else will
> ldap give me?  in the future i'll probably integrate these boxes with
> a network that does use ldap, but it will be a different ldap domain
> (correct terminology? - i mean this like a domain in nis terms).  most
> likely i'll use that ldap tree just for email address completion in mutt.
> 
> kevin
> 
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