Customer Reviews

Deploying OpenLDAP

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is a book produced by merging numerous publicly available materials without too much input from the author. The author seems at a loss what to say when the good stuff is already said by others (other than changing "does not" to "doesn't", etc). Here're some suggestions, in case he plans to write a new edition. For instance, p.77, the first two search filter examples are too easy. But the third one needs a few seconds' thinking. Why not keep building progressively more complicated filters? They would be guaranteed not to be in existing materials. p.144, ACI parameter realm suddenly appears. This "realm" sounds different from that in SASL (p.98 and p.115). But "realm" is never explained anywhere in the book. There're other terms that mean differently but are not explained, such as NSS (p.136 for "Network Security Services" and p.249 for "Name Service Switch"). There're other places in the book that mention something only explained in later chapters, but they're not warned with "We'll explain this in Chapter XXX". The reason is simply that he copies a man page or somebody's article without thinking of adding anything to it. Arrangement of the text is sometimes unexpected. After about 20 pages of Perl methods copied from documentation, p.164 suddenly shows a program in C, not Perl.

This 2005 book discusses technologies of as early as 1998 (not in history section). It may be true that AuthLDAP and TransLDAP modules are not updated since then and C. Donley's web site is gone (pp.264-8). But a responsible book author should tell us anything new around this technology. You shouldn't duplicate Mr. Donley's 1998 article with no comments (and no credit).

In my opinion, if a computer book author dares to list source code, he must add valuable comments, regardless whether the source code already comes with good comments. No need to explain code line by line. But the comments must be insightful. If you don't have any, omit the publicly available code, or readers would wonder if the code is too difficult for you.

Think why most of O'Reilly's books are a success. Take "Sendmail" and "Programming Perl" as examples. The "Sendmail" tome is the easiest to be written as a reprint of documentation. But why do we not have that feeling? Because the authors constantly add text not in documentation, such as if you do this, you would get this error and the solution is such and such. "Programming Perl" does a great job at throwing in real working examples full of wisdom. Documentation can't present too many real-life examples, but a book can and should. If you personally don't have that much experience, gather them from public forums. Be careful though. Don't just copy. Verify, research and add valuable insight. A book author must be an expert in the field.

Lastly, Apress has a Submit Errata page, but they don't send even an auto-reply when you submit one. They don't have View Errata. Tech support doesn't respond. So I'm posting my own Errata at http://rootshell.be/~yong321/computer/bookreview.html#DeployingOpenLDAP (mirrored at stormloader.com/yonghuang/computer/bookreview.html). It took me many hours to create it but please point out errors in it.

check out page 67 of the book for a basic reason why this book is useless:
an entire page of a ftp session downloading openldap. huh? How is this helpful? getting the right version of BerkeleyDB and installing it, or installing and configuring OpenSSL would have been far more helpful to me.
This is another book composed mostly of cut 'n paste from the man pages, header files and varous scripts you can find with google.
Discussion on basic topics such as replication skips over key steps, examples for many issues are not provided or are hidden in the book. I use LDAP at work and I used the O'Reilly book to instal, configure and use OpenLDAP. I have yet to find a question that Deploying OpenLDAP can answer that I can't get faster with google.

This is a great overview that covers all the necessary components of an LDAP deployment, whether you use OpenLDAP or any other implementation. Tom Jackiewicz covers everything from the management decisions necessary before you start your deployment, to the schema, directory information tree, and then goes on to more details topics on the installation and API. This is a fast paced book and covers in just a few pages what other books fill with useless garbage and repetition.

I've read some of the other LDAP books out there and have always complained that they are a bit dated. This book covers modern features of LDAP, reinforces the standards, and is easy to read.

This book covers more recent RFC's that are typically not even mentioned in other references. It also encompasses both commercial and open source solutions to problems of scaling, standards, and interoperability.

Multiple solutions to problems are given for your benefit. Multiple programming languages are covered to make this a complete reference.

The book has an interesting history of LDAP vs. X.500. It covers some of the basics of entries in LDAP and a bit about schemas, also it talks about installing OpenLDAP and has a bunch of scripts and info on how to hook it up with some common apps.

However, I got this book to figure out how to get OpenLDAP working on my home network. I needed to learn about schemas, and here the book falls down. It covers the basic ideas of a schema, but doesn't discuss the different schemas delivered with openldap (what is cosine.schema and why should I care?) and it doesn't give enough examples of how one would use the schemas - I would really have liked to see all the ldif entries for a whole small network covering users and groups, for example.

In the end, I still don't understand why I'm getting LDAP errors when trying to add users with Webmin. I'm disappointed.

Tom Jackiewicz's "Deploying OpenLDAP" provides a good introductory reference to the world of the LDAP administrator, and has a few gems not seen in previous works. While this book contains the usual discussions on compiling and installing the OpenLDAP server, as well as some sample code using implementations of the LDAP API in various languages, it sets itself apart with its detailed treatment of mundane but critical topics such as the LDAP Schema (with reference material on hard-to-find information like a listing of every attribute syntax code and what it means), as well as thoughtful best practices advice. While this is not "the only LDAP book you'll ever need" (there is no such thing, and probably never will be -- the topic is way too broad and ever-changing), it is a valuable compilation that can be recommended for every directory admin's library.

I was looking for a good treatment of not just what decisions need to be made (I knew those already) but realworld examples I could build on.

Pages and pages of command line switches and API does NOT get OpenLDAP deployed.

Whatever happened to the glorious dreams for X.500 and X.400? Roughly speaking, as explained in the book, they were found by many to be simply too cumbersome and overreaching. LDAP and its latest incarnation as OpenLDAP, has largely supplanted X.500 in terms of actual implementation. I recommend the book's Introduction as a succinct history of how LDAP arose in the 90s. It summarises the many RFCs that went out for it and X.500. Gradually, we see the convergence to today's state of affairs. Which the rest of the book explains in detail.

Amusingly, we find that at one point, the X.500 proponents were expecting it to supplant TCP/IP!? Such amazing conceit. Well, LDAP blew it away.

You get advice on installing OpenLDAP. Which is actually pretty straightforward. An experienced sysadmin will not have any problems here. Then there follow several chapters on running it and also writing code to program it. OpenLDAP comes with an API that does require some explanations. Luckily, the API can be accessed via calls in several languages like C and Java. Perl examples are also supplied. The author is commendably ecumenical about supplying example code in several languages. In keeping with the open source spirit of this project.

This is a very solid, end-to-end walkthrough of installing, configuring and using OpenLDAP. Client code comes in a number of languages; C/C++, Java and Perl. The text is well written and very easy to follow. My only complaints are the graphics are used a little too sparingly. And I would have like to have seen more emphasis on LDAP policy, as opposed to the straight technical information presented.

Minor complaints aside, this is an excellent introduction to OpenLDAP for IT engineers looking to deploy it.

Deploying OpenLDAP by Tom Jackiewicz is good for the administrator or
developer who is looking at diving into LDAP. The author splits the
book into two nice segments. Part one of the book talks about how LDAP
came about, setup, and database design. Part two talks about service
integration, the tools included with LDAP and scripting with LDAP.

The first part of this book is good at explaining how LDAP works, and
what to consider when designing your LDAP database. There is also a
section that helps the reader decide on the distribution of LDAP they
want, and how to build the environment from scratch. This part
finishes up with the configuration needed to boot the LDAP server.

Part two picks up where part one left off. It starts off with
integrating LDAP into the services currently running on your network.
The book provides some sample scripts to work with, such as a set of
scripts to sync NIS and LDAP. This section also includes ways of
integrating LDAP with client services like Outlook and SAMBA while
also providing programming API examples for those who want to create
their own LDAP applications.

Overall the book was a good read and I would recommend it to anyone
who is just starting to work with LDAP, or wants to know more about
the system that they are administrating. The provided configuration
files for the LDAP install are a little out of date, but they still
provide good information. The commands are still current and
Jackiewicz does an excellent job of explaining all the different areas
of OpenLDAP.