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OpenLDAP
OpenLDAP is a free, open source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) developed by the…
OpenLDAP is a free, open source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) developed by the…
OpenLDAP is a free, open source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) developed by the OpenLDAP Project. It is released under its own BSD-style license called the OpenLDAP Public License.
LDAP is a platform-independent protocol. Several common Linux distributions include OpenLDAP Software for LDAP support. The software also runs on BSD-variants, as well as AIX, Android, HP-UX, macOS, Solaris, Microsoft Windows (NT and derivatives, e.g. 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7, etc.), and z/OS.
OpenLDAP has three main components:
Historically the OpenLDAP server (slapd, the Standalone LDAP Daemon) architecture was split between a frontend which handles network access and protocol processing, and a backend which deals strictly with data storage. This split design was a feature of the original University of Michigan code written in 1996[9] and carried on in all subsequent OpenLDAP releases. The original code included one main database backend and two experimental/demo backends. The architecture is modular and many different backends are now available for interfacing to other technologies, not just traditional databases.
Note: In older (1.x) releases, the terms “backend” and “database” were often used interchangeably. To be precise, a “backend” is a class of storage interface, and a “database” is an instance of a backend. The slapd server can use arbitrarily many backends at once and can have arbitrarily many instances of each backend (i.e., arbitrarily many databases) active at once.
Currently, 17 different backends are provided in the OpenLDAP distribution, and various third parties are known to maintain other backends independently. The standard backends are loosely organized into three different categories:
Some backends available in older OpenLDAP releases have been retired from use, most notably back-ldbm which was inherited from the original UMich code, and back-tcl which was similar to back-perl and back-shell.
Support for other backends will soon be withdrawn as well. back-ndb is deprecated now since the partnership with MySQL that led to its development was terminated by Oracle after Oracle acquired MySQL. back-bdb and back-hdb will be deprecated in favor of back-mdb soon since back-mdb is superior in all aspects of performance, reliability, and manageability.
In practice, backends like -perl, -shell, and -sock allow interfacing to any arbitrary programming language, thus providing limitless capabilities for customization and expansion. In effect the slapd server becomes an RPC engine with a compact, well-defined and ubiquitous API.
Ordinarily an LDAP request is received by the frontend, decoded, and then passed to a backend for processing. When the backend completes a request, it returns a result to the frontend, which then sends the result to the LDAP client. An overlay is a piece of code that can be inserted between the frontend and the backend. It is thus able to intercept requests and trigger other actions on them before the backend receives them, and it can also likewise act on the backend’s results before they reach the frontend. Overlays have complete access to the slapd internal APIs, and so can invoke anything the frontend or other backends could perform. Multiple overlays can be used at once, forming a stack of modules between the frontend and the backend.
Overlays provide a simple means to augment the functionality of a database without requiring that an entirely new backend be written, and allow new functionalities to be added in compact, easily debuggable and maintainable modules. Since the introduction of the overlay feature in OpenLDAP 2.2 many new overlays have been contributed by the OpenLDAP community.
Currently, there are 21 overlays in the core OpenLDAP distribution, with another 15 overlays in the user-contributed code section, and more awaiting approval for inclusion.
The core overlays include:
The contrib overlays include:
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