Several Netscape applications, including web browsers using the Netscape
Roaming Access feature, are
LDAP-enabled. Sendmail can use LDAP to look
up addresses. Your organization can use LDAP as an organization-wide
directory and/or name service (in place of NIS or flat files). You can
even use a personal LDAP server to keep track of your own email address
book (see the section called Additional Resources).
Since LDAP is an open and configurable protocol, it can be used to store
almost any type of information relating to a particular organizational
structure.
Several LDAP client applications are available that greatly
simplify viewing and changing LDAP information:
LDAP Browser/Editor — A
user-friendly tool written in 100% Java for easy deployment
across different platforms, available at http://www.iit.edu/~gawojar/ldap
GQ — A GTK-based LDAP client,
available with the Red Hat Linux 7.1 distribution or at http://biot.com/gq
kldap — An LDAP client for the
KDE Project, available at http://www.mountpoint.ch/oliver/kldap
LDAP can be used as an authentication service via the
pam_ldap module. LDAP is commonly used as a
central authentication server so that users have a unified login that
covers console logins, POP servers, IMAP servers, machines connected to
the network using Samba, and even Windows NT/2000 machines. Using LDAP, all of these
login situations can rely on the same user ID and password combination,
greatly simplifying administration. The pam_ldap
module is provided in the nss_ldap package.
