Celejar wrote:
Your example of LDAP, OTOH, is an interesting one. I've tried more
than once to grok LDAP, and given up in bafflement. I can't quite tell
if it's inherently just overkill for my needs, or if my Google-fu is
just insufficient to find a basic introduction to the system. [I'd be
using it on my personal systems, to share contact information between
different application and perhaps across several systems.] Every
introduction I've seen involves creating from scratch complicated
schema and doing quite a bit of planning and writing of files. This
may be unavoidable, and LDAP may indeed be overkill for my minimal
needs, or I may have merely been unable to find the appropriate docs.
This supports your point that sometimes asking on the list might be
appropriate even for subjects that return many Google hits.
To continue wandering off-topic, in the hope of learning something: yes,
LDAP is grossly overspecified for email contact lists, but there appears
to be nothing else. All email clients can use LDAP directories, but no
other kind. So I run slapd on my Etch server purely to make a couple of
dozen email addresses available to various machine/OS combinations on my
network. That's not exactly a problem, but slapd is a greedy beast and
seems to be a waste of resources for such a simple job.
And yes, there's not a huge amount to learn, but you have to learn all
of it at once to get started on even the simplest job. Something I found
was that there's no one way to do things in LDAP, which is a bit
unnerving. Read half a dozen LDAP tutorials, and you find at least five
slightly different approaches, which are not easy to reconcile. Quite a
few different configurations and schemas will give the same result when
you look up an email address from Thunderbird. Still, a Google on 'ldap
address book tutorial' turns up quite a few results, from 'do this,
this, and this' to some more explanatory texts.
You only really need the core and inetorgperson schemas, and I think the
system also wants cosine and nis, but possibly the Debian default
installation will put them in anyway. Your contact is basically an
inetorgperson with most fields left blank, you don't need to add any
further schemas unless you want to link some exotic data structure to
the contact. You need a root domain, generally your email domain name
being convenient, but it doesn't matter a lot. You probably want an
Organisational Unit, for which I used 'Contacts', and since I never got
round to using LDAP for anything else, was probably unnecessary. You
need a name and password for the admin, and I think that's about it.
There are various LDAP administrators and GUI address books to tweak
entries, and it's not hard to work out a csv to ldif converter to
migrate the addresses in. I use a few perl scripts to add and edit
through a web browser, and only use an admin program if I need to do
something a bit technical.
I've been looking for an LDAP/SQL contact gateway for years, but nobody
else seems to want it and I don't really know enough to do a decent job
of it myself. Contact LDAP queries are extremely simple, just returning
a list of inetorgperson records, and I'm sure it shouldn't be hard to
translate that to an SQL query, and reformat the response. MySQL is also
greedy, but I run that for many purposes.
--
Joe
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