Re: Learning Curve Questions

[Adam Williams <awilliam@whitemice.org>]

>I'm new to LDAP, (well maybe).
>I have a situation here where I am trying to get a better control over
>the maint and admin of mail accounts, pop3 retrievels, and domain
>zones.  I have been going down the list trying to find a viable
>soultion.  I am now on the LDAP concept and have a few questions before
>I speed the next two days reading.
>Is LDAP what I need to be able to update mail accounts (how would
>qpopper talk to LDAP),

LDAP stores configuration, authentication, and authorization
information,  it doesn't process mail, but the mail providing services
use LDAP as a configuration backend.

>can I use LDAP to manage zone records?

Yes, there is a SDB module for bind, so that bind uses LDAP instead of
files for domain information.  It works very well and performance is
excellent.

>I read in the Usersguid that one can use an SQL backend DB instead of
>the flatfile.  However, it never went on to say how to do that.  Is
>there any receipes for putting that together?

There are some documents available on freshmeat, it is pretty gnarly
since LDAP and SQL use entirely different data models.  It is really
best for providing LDAP access to CRM systems, etc... and not as a
primary backend - see the OpenLDAP Faq-O-Matic.

I have a LDAP presentation that covers some of these topics -
ftp://ftp.kalamazoolinux.org/pub/pdf/ldapv3.pdf