openldap question

[whschwartz]

I'm looking for a way to have one addressbook that I can access from any client (thunderburd on windows, evolution on linux, outlook express, etc..)

It's just tough to keep the same addressbook on all the different systems I use. Would setting up an ldap server on my gentoo system be an easy solution for this? I don't plan to use it for logins right now, just a global address book. Might use login auth from it down the road.

[possumjc]

whschwartz,
It depends on what you mean by easy
I use OpenLDAP as an authentication system on a network of 1200 users. I have not told too many users about using it as an addressbook but I have done so myself. I think that it would work fine for what you want. Setting it up can be a chore sometimes though. I will be glad to help if you decide to go down that road.

Regards,
Joel

[whschwartz]

Well it looks like a good option for me plus we've started using ldap at work so the learning experience would be wonderful for me.


I"ve found this post http://www.lula.org/pipermail/lula/2003-June/000498.html which seems helpful and talks about doing exactly what I want.

I have openldap installed on my gentoo system now. Is the stuf in that link a ood place to start or can you lay it out a little better?

The addresbooks I'm looking to combine are:
1. Palm Desktop (this is where most of my non email address data is stored for all my family/friend
2. Mozilla Thunderbird which is ldif already. I made this by using "abook" to convert my mutt address file to abook format then to ldif format to import into thunderbird

So basically I'd like to put my palm desktop address book into an ldap database and add in the email addresses I have in thunderbird. Then I can access the data from pretty much any ap on any os platform.

[dogghaus]

To answer an already answered question, yes, LDAP works very well as an authentication system and/or address book.

What I would recommend is learning a little about the structure of LDAP before jumping in (especially if it's a production server), such as read/write permissions and schema components especially. The default schemas cover a wide variety of attributes, but in order to get certain things to register in addressbooks you may have to write customized ones or add new schemas. For my Mozilla mail client I had to create a Company attribute that Mozilla could read.

Also, you may want to consider how you will be updating this addressbook. Thunderbird's addressbook (or any mail client I know of) will not update an LDAP directory. There are many excellent open source packages out there that directly interface with an LDAP directory, such as Horde (what I use for mail and addressbook) and Rolodap. You may want to investigate this, so you won't have to run an ldapadd command every time you want to add an address.

If you have any questions, I'll keep an eye on this post and maybe I can help.