Running the slapd Server - Page 9

Before we start the slapd server (the LDAP server), we need some sample data that we can feed to the directory:

dn: o=myorg, c=US
o: myorg

dn: mail=richardc@xyz.com, o=myorg, c=US
cn: Richard Collins
mail: richardc@xyz.com
locality: Birmingham
description: Linux enthusiast
telephonenumber: 3283-3920392-32932
objectclass: top
objectclass: person

dn: mail=hrawat@hrawat.com, o=myorg, c=US
cn: Harish Rawat
mail: harawat@hrawat.com
locality: San Mateo
description: Java coder
telephonenumber: 870-28912-221
objectclass: top
objectclass: person

We need to save this file in a convenient location, say in /home/ldaptest/myaddrdir.ldif. This file is in the LDIF format and needs to be converted into the format of the back-end database and inserted into the directory's datastore. Before this is done, we need to keep the slapd.conf configuration file handy; we could save it as /home/ldaptest/myslapd.conf:

/usr/local/sbin/ldif2ldbm -i /home/ldaptest/myaddrdir.ldif
-f /home/ldaptest/myslapd.conf

The -f /home/ldaptest/myslapd.conf option says that the configuration file to be used is /home/ldaptest/myslapd.conf and -i /home/ldaptest/myaddrdir.ldif advises the program to insert the LDIF file into the database.

To start up the server on the local machine at port number 9009 using the configuration file /home/ldaptest/myslapd.conf:

/usr/local/libexec/slapd localhost -p 9009 -f /home/ldaptest/myslapd.conf
-d 5

We use the argument -d 5 to start the server in the debug mode (at level 5) so that we get to see what the server is doing. Note that if we do not specify the -p option, the server is started to listen on port 389, which is the standard LDAP port. If we do not have root privileges on the machine we attempt to start slapd on, we need to change the port to a number greater than 1024.

Testing the Installation

We can test our installation using a Netscape Communicator browser. To do this start the address book and change the settings so that it can search data in our newly set up directory server. From File menu, choose New Directory and fill in the details of the new directory server (in this case, the server name is localhost and port number is 9009) and also the search prefix (o=myorg, c=us in this case). Now typing the name attribute of an entry, say Richard, in the Search for names containing field should return the entry from the server.

Another way to do this would be to use the command line utility ldapsearch, which comes with OpenLDAP itself:

/usr/local/bin/ldapsearch -h localhost -p 9009 -b 'o=myorg, c=us'
'cn=*Richard*'

This should return the entry corresponding to Richard in the directory. The -b flag is to indicate the DN to be used as a suffix. The actual search criteria is cn=*Richard*, that is look for all entries which have a common name with the sub-string Richard.

We could use other command line utilities that come with OpenLDAP like ldapadd, ldapmodify, and ldapdelete to add, modify, and delete entries respectively.

LDAP Support in PHP

PHP's support for LDAP is explicitly meant to provide client access to back-end LDAP directory servers, so that applications built upon PHP as a server-side scripting language can work with the data in these directories.

An example is a web-based e-mail client (such as Yahoo Mail or Hotmail) that could be implemented using PHP. The users of this e-mail service may need to access their address books to search for entries which they can transparently add to their To: or Cc: fields, and also update their address books. The actual address book could reside on an LDAP server and PHP's LDAP client API could be used to talk to the directory server to provide transparent access to the address book.

PHP is capable of generating HTML, especially forms that can be used to enter data and search criteria. This feature could be used to interact with the LDAP server, thus providing a front-end (which can be dynamically generated) to the LDAP server in the back-end.

Installing and Configuring an LDAP Server - Page 8
Professional PHP4 Programming
The PHP LDAP API - Page 10