LDAP be killing me. I need a good step by step

Craig White craigwhite at azapple.com
Wed Jan 9 14:45:53 UTC 2008


On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 22:39 +0800, Ed Greshko wrote:
> Craig White wrote:
> > On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 14:16 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> >> Brian Millett wrote:
> >>
> >>> I have a file of names, phone numbers, etc. that has the following format
> >>> that is used at my work:
> >>> Name|Email|Ext.|Home #|Cellular #|Pager|Title
> >>>
> >>> sample data:
> >>>
> >>> Baker, Steve B.|sbb|15|314-215-4141|314-591-8181|| Director of Technology
> >>> Bowland, Chris|cyb|33|314-835-1216||314-663-3132|Java Developer
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> I wrote a perl script to parse this and put it into a valid ldif format:
> >> Thanks for your script, which I shall study.
> >>
> >> But one problem with setting up an address book in this way
> >> is that there seems to be no standard LDAP format for addresses,
> >> and an email client probably will not understand a particular format.
> >>
> >> For example, I use kmail, which claims to understand LDAP.
> >> But if you export your kmail (or kaddressbook) list in LDIF format
> >> it is more of less useless for putting on an openldap server.
> >>
> >> As far as I can see, the only reasonably general format for this is vCard
> >> (which is more or less what kmail uses)
> >> but there doesn't seem to be any standard way
> >> of translating vCard to LDAP (or LDIF) format.
> >>
> >> It's amazing to me that there is not a standard way
> >> of putting an address book on an openldap server
> >> which can be understood by all email clients
> >> since this seems to be the major use of openldap.
> >>
> >> But I am far from expert in this subject;
> >> perhaps I have misunderstood the situation?
> > ----
> > On Fedora (I think, for certain on RHEL), the openldap-servers comes
> > with many 'migration' scripts from padl that can take static file
> > entries (/etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, /etc/group, /etc/hosts...) and
> > migrate them into an LDIF which you can then import. Their scripts are
> > very, very good and should be the basis for anyone looking to migrate to
> > LDAP.
> > 
> > Address Book clients such as Kontact (which is what Kmail would use), or
> > Thunderbird, Evolution, Outlook, etc. all have differing notions of
> > which attributes LDAP should offer. Let me repeat this another
> > way...THERE ARE NO STANDARDS for attributes that Address Book client
> > applications will use. This can be viewed as a negative or a positive.
> > Positive because you can support a variety of address book clients in a
> > variety of ways. Negative because if you don't know what you're doing,
> > it's confusing.
> > 
> > Therefore, whatever any program exports as an LDIF will differ from each
> > other program and it's up to the 'administrator' to do find/replace for
> > the attributes that they intend to use on the LDAP server...the only
> > other way is the Microsoft way which is prescribed. Once you absorb the
> > methodology, it becomes clear that the Microsoft way is limiting.
> 
> Funny....  I knew that Ric's extremely general question was going to fan out 
> to be much more than he thought he was asking......
> 
> I'd dump all that I know about ldap here....but it would take me too long to 
> type it all and maybe never answer the question that Ric thinks he is 
> asking.  :-)
----
lateral answer, I directed him to the Administrator's Guide on the
OpenLDAP's website.

This was simply a clarification on why different address book clients
write different attributes in an exported LDIF file which probably will
fail when you try to ldapadd/slapadd them into LDAP

Craig




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