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Full Discussion: UNIX authentication strategy - LDAP or AD
Operating Systems AIX UNIX authentication strategy - LDAP or AD Post 302755095 by bakunin on Friday 11th of January 2013 07:13:33 PM
Old 01-11-2013
To quote from RFC1925 (The Twelve Truths of Networking):
Cheap, Fast, Reliable: pick any two, you can't have all three.
None of these tools is "easy", "cheap" or "simple": they are complex and you can easily spend a lot of money and effort to cover in production what you "saved" in development by cutting efforts. To put it bluntly: it is easy to plan poorly and save that way a neglectable amount of cost and effort just to have a nearl unworkable envirnment in production which is a pain in the ass for all. I have seen a lot of such "simple solutions" which - once they were implemented - everybody hated with a passion.

So my first advice is: do NOT plan in short terms! A centralized authenticaltion solution is a very "core" technology and you will have to live with your decisions for a very long time. Plan thoroughly and you will have a valuable addition to your data center which saves you a lot of effort in the long run. Plan poorly and you will have additional effort and work on top of what you already do.

Second: stick to (open) standards as much as possible. all the products of a single producer have faltered over time, while open standards tend to stay: compare TCP/IP (the open internet protocol) with the IPX/SPX protocol from Novell and the NetBIOS protocol from Microsoft: all three were commonly used 15 years ago. Which one was open? Which one is still there? As long as there is only a single company producing something without an independent standard behind it it will not stay in the market for any prolonged time, regardless how big the company is: IBM invented the Microchannel bus and even as it was a technically excellent solution, today IBM builds its workstations and high-end systems (pSeries) on PCI. PCI is not better than Microchannel, but it was always independent and standardized while the Microchannel was IBMs patent - it still didn't stay.

So my second advice is: use LDAP, simply because it is an open, company-independent standard. Which LDAP server you use is irrelevant, it is easy to replace one with the other. Replacing a protocol is way more difficult than replacing to server providing it. Well, in fact it is not irrelevant, but a lot less relevant than the decision about the architecture of your authentication structure.

I hope this helps.

bakunin
 

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LEARN ABOUT CENTOS

ldif2ldap

LDIF2LDAP(8)						      System Manager's Manual						      LDIF2LDAP(8)

NAME

       ldif2ldap - Directory Server script for adding entries

SYNOPSIS

       ldif2ldap [-Z serverID] [-D <rootdn>] -w <password> -f <ldifFile> [-P protocol] [-h]

DESCRIPTION

       Performs an import operation over LDAP to the Directory Server. To run this script, the server must be running.

OPTIONS

       A summary of options is included below:

       -Z Server Identifier
	      The server ID of the Directory Server instance.  If there is only one instance on the system, this option can be skipped.

       -D Root DN
	      The Directory Manager DN, or root DN.  If not specified, the script will search the server instance configuration for the value.

       -w password
	      The rootdn password.

       -f LDIF file
	      The LDIF file with the entries to add.

       -P Protocol
	      The  connection  protocol  to  connect  to the Directory Server.	Protocols are STARTTLS, LDAPS, LDAPI, and LDAP.  If this option is
	      skipped, the most secure protocol that is available is used.  For LDAPI, AUTOBIND is also available for the root user.

       -h
	      Display the usage.

EXAMPLE

       ldif2ldap -Z instance3 -D 'cn=directory manager' -w password -f /LDAP/ldif/entries.ldif -P STARTTLS

       Note: security must be enabled to use protocol STARTTLS.  If STARTTLS is not available it will default to next strongest/available protocol
       automatically.

DIAGNOSTICS

       Exit status is zero if no errors occur.	Errors result in a non-zero exit status and a diagnostic message being written to standard error.

AUTHOR

       ldif2ldap was written by the 389 Project.

REPORTING BUGS

       Report bugs to http://bugzilla.redhat.com.

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (C) 2013 Red Hat, Inc.

								    Mar 5, 2013 						      LDIF2LDAP(8)
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