Hi Gabriel, --- Gabriel Ambuehl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > > Hello Adam, > > Saturday, September 29, 2001, 11:50:28 PM, you wrote: > > > For what I'm trying to do I do need virtual domains and > > accounts. I already use qmail + vpopmail in this way, but I'd > > like to use LDAP as the back end database for user management, > > virtual domains management, etc. > > > Is this possible without writing new code at present? > > I don't think so. MySQL is in place, though. Ah well...
> I know it is off topic, but I'd really be interested what advantages > you (and anyone else) see in running LDAP for email accounts (and the > rest of the vhosting stuff, for that matter) compared to saving the > stuff in a simple SQL setup. To me, SQL appears to be much easier to > setup and maintain, especially as most vhost setups got MySQL up and > running anyhow, but OpenLDAP is a beast that won't do what you want > without some good amount of work... Comments? I think that OpenLDAP 1.x suffers from not insisting on data schemas (it runs with schema checking off by default!). Not only that I am having trouble getting OpenLDAP to log to syslog 8(. This makes it easy to build useless directories. OpenLDAP 2.x (LDAPv3) directories must have schemas. This enforces structure as you cannot put data in ad hoc. IMO a relational database is not best suited for what is essentially just an address book. A directory is better suited. LDAP is optimised for reads, since the operations in a directory are mainly read. The nature of the data are not particularly relational either (witness the simplicity of the RDB schema in the SQL-based tools). LDAP has built-in replication clustering, something that can be taken advantage of with in qmail-ldap. The memory footprint of slapd 1.12.11 is <1MB on my FreeBSD box, while mysqld weighs in at 25MB. I am not criticising RDBs by the way. But IMO they are best suited to dealing with relational data. I do like the tool (I forget it's name), that stores e-mail in a database. This seems to be a space efficient manner to store e-mail that is cc:d to an entire organisation, since only one copy of each e-mail need be stored. I wouldn't advocate storing actual e-mail data in an LDAP store! However, I would be reluctant to run my mail queue from a RDB. Having said all that, I have not investigated the loading characteristics of OpenLDAP 1 or 2. A poster to the qmail-ldap list warned me off OpenLDAP 2, for example, because of instability under load. I was hoping to run everything under LDAP because I did not want to run (and have to maintain) LDAP + some flavour of sqld. And the data I am dealing with (user details, aliases, virtual domains and members, etc.) are best suited to a directory. I have some more thinking to do! Adam. ____________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.co.uk address at http://mail.yahoo.co.uk or your free @yahoo.ie address at http://mail.yahoo.ie
