Building an LDAP Server on Linux, Part 3

So, you've come back for more OpenLDAP fun. Part 1 of this series served as an introduction to the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, with a breakdown of what the protocol can and cannot do. In Part 2 we covered installation and a very basic configuration. Today we'll populate our directory with actual data and glide effortlessly through some of the more common showstoppers.

Let's start with a review of our slapd.conf configuration from part 2:

##Database Directives##
database bdb
suffix "dc=carlasworld,dc=net"
rootdn "cn=Manager,dc=carlasworld,dc=net"
rootpw secret
directory "/var/lib/ldap"

Let's take a good look at each line in the configuration.

• First, make sure to replace "carlasworld.net" with your real domain.
  


• The rootdn is extremely important. This is where you create the authorized user to make entries into the database. Here I've called it Manager. You can make this anything: admin, boss, ldapdeitysupreme — whatever your heart desires.
  


• rootpw is also of extreme importance. This is the authorized user's (Manager's) password. For now, we'll use a cleartext password. In the example above, it's "secret"; again the password can be anything you want.
  


• The directory where OpenLDAP stores the actual database files is on the next line. This directory MUST exist before starting slapd.

The directory will already be populated by the following files:

$ ls /var/lib/ldap
__db.001 __db.003 __db.005 id2entry.bdb objectClass.bdb
__db.002 __db.004 dn2id.bdb log.0000000001

Page 2: Is It Working Yet?