Re: Question about writing custom backends for openldap

[Michael L Torrie <torriem@chem.byu.edu>]

On Thu, 2005-06-02 at 22:03 -0700, Howard Chu wrote:
> In general, you should think very carefully about the reasons that are 
> motivating you to write a custom backend. In many cases it's more 
> efficient to write an overlay that runs on top of an existing backend 
> instead. As a specific case in point, the password policy overlay 
> demonstrates how to maintain per-session information in the overlay's 
> private data.

Thanks for the information.  This is a great help.   I am now looking
into writing a custom overlay that will be combined with the back-ldap
backend.  The goal is to write a system to make account administration
easier by allowing custom external scripts to execute as triggers to do
things like create appropriate home directories on file servers, etc.  I
currently already have a system that does this, but it based completely
on my own standalone LDAP proxy server. 

I have read the overlay introduction document and I think overlays can
do everything I need to do.  From my reading overlays can:
1. modify any ldap request and then pass it on to the backend
2. respond to a request, bypassing the backend altogether
3. modify a response from the backend before passing it to the frontend
4. replace a response from the backend

Is this correct?

I'll being to investigate this path for basing my project on.  I'll
probably have a few programming questions later.  Should those be asked
here or on the devel list?

thank you.

Michael


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