LDAP Directory Technology Review

The initial implementation involved the Red Hat Linux Enterprise Operating System with the OpenLDAP distribution available within the Red Hat distribution. The system was installed with the Apache 1.3 web server, MySQL 4.1, PHP 4.3.3 and Bind8.

After the initial setup failed to authenticate the MySQL database against the OpenLDAP, the hard-drive was formatted and the system was installed using the SUSE 7.6 distribution.

Since the problems persisted, the evaluation version of the SUSE Linux Open Exchange Server 3 was deployed to determine if the problem with the MySQL database server was due to incompatibility issues.

The implementation was also attempted on a server running Windows XP, but with the Windows port of the OpenLDAP server developed by Lucas Bergman and the Windows distribution of the OpenLDAP server available by ILEX.

The OpenLDAP server can store all its data into a MySQL database using the Back-SQL module of the distribution, but authentication of MySQL databases through OpenLDAP was not possible, using the Operating System and Software combinations mentioned above.

Installation, configuration and troubleshooting of the software packages mentioned above was outside the work undertaken during the MSc Computing & Information Systems, thus requiring additional time to learn.