Overload 22 Editorial – LDAP
C++
Not much has happened in ‘John’s world of C++’ over the past couple of months. Mostly because I’ve been in the midst of a trans-Atlantic relocation. My wife and I have moved house, job, and country – a slightly stressful experience – and one which doesn’t leave much time for software introspection. Except that I feel like my life instance has been deconstructed and reconstructed.
Class Life {} Merrills;
Unfortunately, I was instantiated at my new company with an incorrect attribute. They misspelled my surname. Not such a big deal, you might think. But, there are a lot of machines that are out there that know exactly who I am, and what I’m up to. I’ve been battling these evil boxes for two weeks now, all the time only having half an existence. Ever seen the Richard E. Grant film ‘How to get ahead in advertising?’ Well, the transition has felt a bit like that. Just as I get one entry repaired, I discover my incorrect details have been replicated to yet another database. It’s not just the sign on my cubicle. It’s my electronic mailbox, my real world mail box, my pay cheques, the key-card system, even my phone thinks I’m this other bloke. So finally, I think I’ve fixed everything. But, having created the real ‘Merrells’, I have to kill off this ‘Merrills’ doppleganger. A HR form is involved! The employment of ‘Merrills’ must be terminated because of incompetence, gross moral turpitude, or death.
Better Living Through Directories
What’s the solution to all this replicated redundant people information? Well, every network should have a single store of network users, and their attribute values. The system administrator would only need to maintain a single database, and each of the evil network services and databases can then be directed to the central store.
‘Directory Servers’ do indeed exist, but are generally proprietary. NDS appears to be what’s kept Novell alive for the past few years, and now they’re pushing it onto other network platforms. NT’s inability to scale up to large networks is due to the lack of a cohesive directory, but this should all be solved by the Active-Directory in NT 5.0.
Shouldn’t there be a standard for this sort of thing? Well, X.500 is the ISO Standard for directory services, but it was designed by a committee, is very complex, and hence very expensive to implement. (Sound a little familiar?)
LDAP
In steps a nifty Internet directory access protocol standard. It defines how a client can access simple directory services like add, modify, search, and delete. Most system software companies are LDAP enabling their email client and server products at the moment. For messaging systems the directory simply provides another form of address book. Since the directory has a DNS address, and your machine is connected to the net, you can use any public directory server which supports LDAP. For instance there’s a Internet white pages directory at http://www.four11.com
My new found Zeal
My LDAP fever is no coincidence. I’ve moved from Octel’s Unified Messenger, based in London, to Netscape’s LDAP Directory Server, based in Mountain View California. Since they advise, ‘write about what you know best’, I’ll be filling some of these pages with my struggle to LDAP the world.
On to the more visceral experiences in life…
The Joy of Fry’s
Time to introduce you to the mecca of nerd-dome. Picture this, the largest warehouse you’ve ever been in, decked out as a Mayan temple, filled with all goods required by the modern technophile. Yes! Resistors, cable ties, mother boards, processors, disks, PDAs, laptops, colour scanners, radio scanners, printers, books, CDs, DVDs, radar detectors, laser pointers, pagers, washing machines, walk-in fridges, and a TV for $9000. Oh yeah, Fry’s started out as a supermarket, so they sell food too… Beef Jerky and Jolt Cola!
John Merrells
October 1997
