[ale] LDAP poster child

[Frank Zamenski]

All:

At work there's IS mgt rumblings of eventually migrating our Solaris 2.6/8
NIS servers, Novell 4.11 servers, and W2K/NT servers to W2K ADS for
centralized user and directory services. I'm not up on LDAP, other than
setting up an iPlanet LDAP app server under a consultants guidance and
seeing some resemblance to Novell NDS object and container cfgs, thus the
need to become pro-active. I also recognize that NIS will soon enough go
away due to it's own limitations. (As we utilize it, NIS really doesn't save
much SA time anyway, and I'm getting to that 'there has to be a better way'
feeling toward it.) It's also my vague understanding that Unix LDAP must be
in place before any migration to this ADS scheme will work. Hence, questions
to the enlightened:

1). Is there a recognized definitive overview on LDAP, and if so, where is
it? (iPlanet's site of course has their iWS and iAS sw's, and the
documentation is pretty good, but I've not noticed anything in the way of
basic LDAP tutorials there. And Solaris 8 comes bundled with LDAP, but it
assumes a working knowledge to set it up.)
2). Has anyone done an NIS to LDAP migration? What were your experiences?
3). How about this LDAP to ADS migration, anyway? Good/bad idea? Is ADS even
available on Win2K yet? (I know that's a 'strong' Msft W2K selling point,
but I've chosen to stay somewhat Msft ignorant as reading their hype and FUD
isn't worth my time.)
4). Am I correct in assuming Unix printers also become objects under LDAP,
similar to printers under Novell's NDS? (If so, and given that Solaris
printing without HP Jetadmin is rather ugly anyway IMO, that alone might be
worth an LDAP pilot on a few Unix test servers.)

Any related experiences, comments, testimonials, hints, tricks, caveats, and
flames cheerfully accepted.

Thanks.
-fgz

CC: MDLUG, ALE



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