Playing with OpenLDAP

I had some time today, so decided to setup OpenLDAP on my server at home and play with it a little bit.

For starters, I installed it with a Debian apt-get install slapd. Then I found the Quick-Start Guide gave me a working LDAP.

This guide to setting up and maintaining an OpenLDAP server also had some good information...I decided not to use the LDAP as an authentication source for my server.

The detail of what types of information that I could include in the standard schema was easily found here: http://www.zytrax.com/books/ldap/ape/#attributes

The next thing I wanted to do was get some data out there. So I used this script to export my contacts from Outlook.

Understanding queries (filters in LDAP terminology) was my next hurdle and this site gave me the answers to all I needed to know.

Then I wanted to play with LDAP via something other than the command line tools, so I did a quick search and found that Net::LDAP existed for Perl, so Perl it was!

All-in-all, it was a day that I learned a fair bit...and now I have an LDAP server to play with. I did connect this LDAP to my installation of squirrel mail, so now I have all of my addresses available everywhere - I like that!