[KLUG Members] New additions to the KLUG Library

[Adam Tauno Williams]

>Would someone be willing to quickly (100 words or fewer) explain what
>LDAP is and why someone would be interested in using it as opposed to
>something such as Samba? 

?

LDAP is a directory service,  Samba is not.  They don't solve the same problem.
 I use both,  in addition to Sendmail, NFS, PAM, NSS, Squid, Apache+PHP, etc....
 The purpose of a directory service is to unify services (Samba, sendmail, nss)
and distribute information (pager numbers, first names, mail addresses, cell
phone numbers, fax numbers, photographs).

All services (samba, imap, pam, squid) authenticate with passwords stored in the
user's object.  That same user object tells sendmail where to send my mail, 
what my local mail accounts are (adam@morrison-ind.com, adam@mor-value.com,
adam@cisco-inc.com, domainmaster@morrison-ind.com, abuse@morrison-ind.com,
admin@morrison-ind.com, etc...),  what I want my outgoing mail re-written to
(adam@morrison-ind.com), it lets people using our LDAP server lookup my e-mail
address, pager number, cell phone number, fax number with their
whatever-mail-client,  it tells the VPN server if I can establish PPTP
connections, the access server if I can dial in,  the business system what
companie's accounting files I can screw up,  etc...

Systems and Network Administrator
Morrison Industries
1825 Monroe Ave NW.
Grand Rapids, MI. 49505