| Red Hat Linux 7.2: The Official Red Hat Linux Reference Guide | ||
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| Prev | Chapter 15. Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) | Next |
Several Netscape applications, including web browsers using the Netscape Roaming Access feature, are LDAP-enabled. Sendmail can use LDAP to look up addresses. Your organization can use LDAP as an organization-wide directory and/or name service (in place of NIS or flat files). You can even use a personal LDAP server to keep track of your own email address book (see the section called Additional Resources).
Since LDAP is an open and configurable protocol, it can be used to store almost any type of information relating to a particular organizational structure.
Several LDAP client applications are available that greatly simplify viewing and changing LDAP information:
LDAP Browser/Editor — A user-friendly tool written in 100% Java for easy deployment across different platforms, available at http://www.iit.edu/~gawojar/ldap
GQ — A GTK-based LDAP client, available with the Red Hat Linux 7.2 distribution or at http://biot.com/gq
kldap — An LDAP client for the KDE Project, available at http://www.mountpoint.ch/oliver/kldap
LDAP can be used as an authentication service via the pam_ldap module. LDAP is commonly used as a central authentication server so that users have a unified login that covers console logins, POP servers, IMAP servers, machines connected to the network using Samba, and even Windows NT/2000 machines. Using LDAP, all of these login situations can rely on the same user ID and password combination, greatly simplifying administration. The pam_ldap module is provided in the nss_ldap package.