LDAP Directory Technology Review

Perhaps being the fundamental stage of the Waterfall Model, requirements analysis forms the first attempt to understand the problem domain and detail the functionality required for the successful completion of the following stages.

The objective of this project is to develop a small prototype which can clearly indicate that the development of such a system with the given technology can be accomplished. As such, the requirements for the sub-systems are not what are required in order to produce an application which can compete with the solutions already available.

The interoperability of the technologies required for the operation of the system and the transparent integration under a central management application layer are complex tasks which need to be accomplished in order to produce a highly competitive system. As such, the development time available for the completion of this project prohibits the delivery of such a system.

The system must provide access to various groups of users with different privileges and access rights without compromising security. Additionally, a number of different technologies need to be seamlessly integrated under a centralised application layer.

The following network diagram shows the proposed specification of the system, the major stakeholders and the way the client/server communication is performed and the role of the management application.

Network Diagram

Network Diagram Notes:
The diagram above indicates the connections between the various software packages, the management application, the main stakeholders of the system and the email traffic. Each software application uses data from within the OpenLDAP directory in order to operate, apart from the MySQL database server which is incompatible with Directory technology.

As such, the MySQL server is acting as a “standalone” server and in order to circumvent the LDAP authentication problem, separate accounts need to be created for the users and the management application needs to be able to “synchronise” MySQL with the OpenLDAP Directory Server.