What does LDAP solve?

Asked 2009-05-19T19:30:26.653

I've been in touch with LDAP in many projects I've been involved in but, the truth be told, I don't really understand it. I thought it was just a person directory but after I discovered that it can contain any objects in a hierarchical structure.

I installed openldap in my box and I found many tutorials regarding just the installation.

What is LDAP? What are the scenarios where LDAP is the right choice? What are the LDAP concepts I should know for working with it? What are the advantages of LDAP? Is it used just because old applications used it? Is there a good doc anywhere on internet explaining all this questions?

UPDATE: Complementing the answers I found this link which contains a quick start guide for LDAP newbie like me.

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2 Answers

This link will explain LDAP http://blogs.oracle.com/raghuvir/entry/ldap

We use LDAP in our office for email address lookups company wide. We use it as a single source sign on service for our internal apps as well.

answered 2009-05-19T19:39:00.130

In one of my old workplaces we used LDAP as our primary user authentication system.

This in turn provided our various systems with information which dept. they belonged to, where they should mount their home directories, contact information, employee management.

Not necessarily controlled by LDAP, but other things that we had mixed to work through LDAP was the existence of SQL users, K4, samba and email account generation.

answered 2009-05-19T19:43:35.347

What does LDAP solve?

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