LDAP at Home
By Rasmus Lerdof
Earlier this year, the University of Washington's Office of Computing and Communications released version 4 of my favorite email program, Pine, with support for LDAP. Before that, I didn't have much use for LDAP. I thought of it as that X500-ish database for maintaining a centrally managed profile of users and network access rights for corporate employees. That, in fact, it may be, but in this article I'll explain why I now run my own LDAP server at home, and show you how I manage it through a simple PHP interface.
Like many other techno freaks, I have a bunch of computers at home all networked together to form my own little LAN. I also have a router and an ISDN connection through which every computer on my LAN can talk to the Internet. I bounce around among my different computers, all running different operating systems, and on top of that I travel quite a bit as well.
My email setup reflects the way I work. I keep my mailbox on a server on the Internet and access it via Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). By doing this I can keep my mail on a central server and access messages in the mailbox from anywhere on the Internet.
Since I send a lot of email, my address book is large and it has been a constant source of annoyance over the years. If I add someone new to my address book at home, and then need to send email to that person from my office the next day, I'm out of luck unless I remembered to copy my address book file onto a floppy and bring it with me, or uploaded it to my office machine. (Sound familiar?) To make matters worse, I don't use the same email program everywhere and the address book from one email program can't be easily loaded into another.<>
