LDAP vs SQL

[Tracy R Reed <treed@ultraviolet.org>]

I'm looking into implementing something like LDAP for my company to help
us manage our user accounts and various other sorts of info. I've read the
faqs and various web pages but there are still a few things I don't
understand. As far as I know, none of our OS's (Linux, HP-UX, SCO)
directly support LDAP in any way. So how can I make use of it? Do most
people have a perl script running on each system that queries the LDAP
server and rebuilds files (password, shadow, tcb, group, aliases, hosts,
dns, etc) based on the info it retrieves? If this is the case, there
doesn't seem to be much advantage to using LDAP over a regular SQL
database. Generating the whole password file sounds kinda risky anyhow.
What if there were a crash as it was half written? At least root would be
first. 

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Tracy Reed      http://www.ultraviolet.org