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Arlukin
Asked: 2011-10-18 10:20:22 +0800 CST

Where do I find USEFUL official documentation for LDAP authentication on Centos/RHEL 6?

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Does it exist any official installation documentation about how to setup an LDAP server that I can connect my clients to with authconfig. I'm will be Centos 6 and RHEL 6.1.

What I can find is this. But I don't need to learn how to restart the services, I'd more like to know what kind of stuff I need to enter in my LDIF files, any SELinux things that needs to be done, how to execute the authconfig tool and stuf that people write in their how to blogs.

Does any thing like that exist? Or do I need to get that information from unupdated blogs and by reading in linux man pages and maybe from openldap.org which has way to much information about things I don't need to know to setup authentication.

centos redhat openldap pam centos6

1 Answers

  1. The answer, of course, depends on what you are trying to achieve, which you have not told us. The official documentation has plenty of operational details and is IMHO quite comprehensive. For details on the authentication configuration see Chapter 10 of the RHEL deployment guide.

    Unfortunately the documentation won't tell you how to design and populate a proper Directory Information Tree (DIT) for your organisation or your needs. It seems this is your problem. Designing a DIT is hard if you have never done it before. You first and foremost need to exactly know, and properly define, which pieces of information you are going to save in the tree (users, groups, machines, ...?). Then think about which applications (Apache, Postfix, NSS, PAM, ...?) need to access those pieces of information and how. This also means learning to use the LDAP tools properly. You also need to learn how objects in a DIT are constructed, i.e. what are the different attributes, what does it mean when an object has an objectClass of inetOrgPerson, how LDAP filters work, etc.

    There are a few books out there which discuss such things, and I have learned much from Matt Butcher's Mastering OpenLDAP, but also from the OpenLDAP mailing lists. Ask useful questions there and you will get useful replies.

    I don't think I can tell you much more without more details from you.

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