LDAP, or lightweight directory access protocol, is a protocol designed to manage and access associated information in a centralized, hierarchical file and directory structure.
It operates like a relational database , but this does not hold true for everything. The hierarchical structure part is the main difference in how the database is related. As it can be used to store any kind of information and is sometimes used as one component of a centralized authentication system. We are going to learn how to install and configure an OpenLDAP server on an Ubuntu 14.04 server.
Install LDAP and Helper Utilities
You first have to install the necessary software, which the whole package needed are available in ubuntu’s default repositories. If this is your first using apt in this session, you will have to refresh your local package index. Then we can install the package we want.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install slapd ldap-utils
During the process you will be asked to select and confirm an administrator password for LDAP, you will have an opportunity to change it if what you put is not what you wanted.
Reconfigure slapd to Select Better Settings
We then have to reconfigure the defaults that ubuntu installs even though the package was just installed. This is because even though the package has the ability to ask a lot of configuration questions, they are skipped over in the installation process.
sudo dpkg-reconfigure slapd
The following questions are very straight forward:
- Omit OpenLDAP server configuration? No
- DNS domain name? you can either select domain name you like even though you don’t have one, bu5t for his guide we will you test.com for our configuration.
- Organization name? sue what pleases you but for this post we will use example as organization name.
- Administrator password? Any password you use here will everwrite the previous password.
- Database backend? HDB
- Remove the database when slapd is purged? No
- Move old database? Yes
- Allow LDAPv2 protocol? No
After this your LDAP should be configured well enough.
