centralized addressbook?

[numerodix]

I wonder if there is a way to have a centralized addressbook on a LAN to connect from different clients. I followed the "Email system for the home network" howto and I have a central imap server working great, an addressbook would really hit the spot now.

Kontact has an option to use an imap addressbook but that function seems to be broken and I wonder how that works anyway, could that be a solution?

I've read the ldap howto on this forum and it just seems too involved for a system that's only gonna be used by me. I also never heard of a way to integrate it well enough with a client, what I'd like to have is just add contacts in the client without having to use phpldapadmin or anything like that, is that possible?

Ps. Is there a way to import Kmail's "recent addresses" into the addressbook somehow?
_________________
undvd - ripping dvds should be as simple as unzip

[Giengaron]

I did a bit of poking around. I agree, the idea of a central address book on the LAN really would be great for productivity!

Prehaps you could fileshare to a central kaddressbook file.

There's LDAP support in mozilla thunderbird, mozilla and evloution.
There are some command line tools you can emerge to manage the directory and there is a python module so you can write your own scripts that leverage the ldap server.

If you use kmail exclusively then on a cursory look i did not find any ldap support at all in kaddressbook.I have kmail 1.5. Kmail 1.7 is part of KDE 3.3 I don't know whats up with LDAP support in the latest version. I was looking at a redhat 9 box that I have not yet upgraded to gentoo

You can also use LDAP for authentication through a module for PAM. I believe that you can use this to create a network login. I have been trying to get NIS working on my lan. Talk about trouble for one guy and his visitors! Arggh! This looks like potentially a much better solution for me !

Finally to come full circle if you create a network login. This would make the file share solution for kmail alot smoother!

I am going to shelf the NIS project in favor of looking into LDAP for a central address book and authentication.

Cheers !

John
aka Giengaron

[numerodix]

Thanks for your ideas.

Well I don't need the network logon as I'm the only one using the system and I'm happy with the way it is now. But I have looked at ldap lately, and though I've been able to set up a database for an addressbook, I've failed in all my efforts to use it interactively from within a mail client. One of the new things in kde 3.3 is kontact, an effort to integrate kmail and kaddressbook among others, which supposedly lets you drag and drop email messages from kmail to kaddressbook (to create new contacts) but when I set up the latter with ldap, I had read only access and the config was pretty flaky too. Now granted I'm completely new to ldap, I wonder what I have to do get get read/write access to the ldap directory.

Same goes for evolution for that matter..
_________________
undvd - ripping dvds should be as simple as unzip