Administration

After you have your LDAP server and clients set up, they require little maintenance until something changes externally. Specifically, if someone in your directory changes jobs, changes her phone number, gets married (changing her surname), quits, or so forth, you need to be able to update your directory to reflect the change.

OpenLDAP comes with a selection of tools for manipulating directories, of which you have already met ldapadd. To add to that, you can use ldapdelete for deleting entries in your directory and ldapmodify for modifying entries. Both are hard to use but come with moderate amounts of documentation in their man pages.

A much smarter option is to use phpLDAPadmin, which is a GPLed LDAP administration tool that allows you to add and modify entries entirely through your web browser. You can learn more and download the product to try at http://www.phpldapadmin.com.