Re: A Beginer Question .. HELP!

[Jim C <jcllings@tsunamicomm.net>]

> I wouldn't wish those RFCs on my worst enemy (well, maybe my WORST 
enemy,
> but not my second worst).  There are lots of other, more user-level,
> documents.  Again - A search of Linux.Com

Me either but ya work with what ya got and so far that, man pages and
the article from Manadrake-secure is what I got.  If it hadn't been for
the Mandrake article I would never have gotten it working.  Even so
there are several things I want to do but cannot figure out how.

BTW, my faculty advisor thinks that my particular choice of a research
topic for my grad thesis has put me on the road to ruin due to the
vagaries of Linux and LDAP.  She may yet be correct.

> I won't disagree there.  So is learning TCP/IP, OSPF, C, XML... or auto
> mechanics, wine making, or medievil poetry.
>>In typical Linux fashion the docs are obtuse and difficult to
>>read
> It is hard to get anymore straight forward than -

> http://linux.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/linux/2001/11/08/ldap.html

Bingo!! I've been looking for that for a very long time.
Thanks, but why have I not yet seen or heard of this?

>>and everyone who knows what they are talking about doesn't want to
>>talk.  They insist you read the documentation first,
> Darn tootin'.  And why talk now?  Many people on this list *WROTE* the
> documentation.  We talked already, and bothered to write it down.
>>Under any other circumstances one could purchase a nice O'Rielly from
>>Amazon but there are no books on OpenLDAP database management or schema
>>deployment available. In other words, one can't even buy ones way out
>>(or in depending on your perspecitve).
.
> Your scope is too narrow.  There are several very good books on LDAP.

and yet you do not name them... ;-)

I have a copy of "Implementing LDAP" by Mark Wilcox.  It's fine if you
like programming LDAP but of course, if you can't get an LDAP database
to a point of usefulness what good is programming?  It also leans
heavily on the NDS side which doesn't help much.  I've heard a rumor
that there will be a new edition of this in January that focuses on
OpenLDAP.  I look forward to it.  I also have a copy of a book I picked
up called the "Linux and Windows Inter-operability Guide" which bytes
because it glosses LDAP badly.

> So what if they don't cover OpenLDAP.  They cover the protocol, the data
> model, the schema concepts.  If you *understand* those things, most of
> slapd's behaviour is obvious.

The problem with not covering the specific topic at hand is that one
cannot get any hands-on time without researching ones life away about
how function X is implemented (or perhaps not!) in OpenLDAP.  I've found
this to be an ugly roadblock to understanding.