Re: Going LDAP #2

[Anders Magnusson <ragge%ludd.ltu.se@localhost>]

Hallvard B Furuseth wrote:
> Quentin Garnier wrote:
>   
>> On Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 04:02:09PM +0200, Hallvard B Furuseth wrote:
>>     
>>> I've just browsed the recent LDAP discussions.  I don't know NetBSD, but
>>> anyway: One possibility I haven't seen mentioned here is to provide LDAP
>>> as an access protocol to your current db files.  (...)
>>>       
>> I'm pretty sure that's what Anders proposed, though.  It depends what
>> you mean by "db" files, though.  I think Anders proposed to get rid of
>> the actual DB files, using the plain text ones as the backend for the
>> LDAP server.
>>     
> All I know is somebody mentioned "the *BSD practice of stuffing
> everything into *.db files":-) I thought Anders meant to populate the
> LDAP server from current data files.  I meant to keep current data files
> (could be text files too for that matter) and provide LDAP as an
> additional access protocol to them.  Not to files that contain
> local-only data mixed in with data to be shared with other hosts though.
>   
Yes, I meant to populate the ldap from the text files, in the same way
as yp does.
Just to let the ldap server access the files directly would be
...interesting... but quite
cool anyway :-) But I think it's better to use a database for it anyway.
>> The assumption is that in the situations where you do not wish to run
>> a LDAP server, the plain text files are good enough already,
>> performance-wise.
>>     
>
> And .db files are hopefully better performance-wise... LDAP's strengths
> are that it is widely supported and a quite general protocol.  It's not
> the tecnically best or fastest way to do anything in particular, except
> it's better and faster to maintain one protocol implementation than a
> score of them.
>   
Yep, exactly.  In fact, it's quite complex if looking at how everything
works, that's
the reason I recommended to write a small ldap server that does the job
well enough :-)