Chapter 5. Migrating Legacy Data to LDAP

This chapter covers migration tools available for transitioning from your current NIS or NIS+ environment to an LDAP-based one.

As discussed in Chapter 2 "Assessing Your Needs for Naming Service Transition and Consolidation," there are two approaches that you can take to transition from legacy naming services to LDAP-based services. One approach is to replace your NIS/NIS+ clients with the Secured LDAP Client. The second approach is to keep your current NIS/NIS+ clients and deploy a transition tool to gain access to LDAP naming service data.

The first approach is covered in Chapter 4 "Deploying Solaris OE LDAP Naming Services." The second approach, using the NIS+ to LDAP Gateway, is discussed in this chapter. A similar transition tool that was in beta test when this book was written, is discussed in Chapter 10 "Emerging Directory Technologies."

In either deployment scenario, the LDAP directory needs to be populated with your naming service data. There are several tools available to accomplish this:

• The ldapaddent command

• Public domain migration scripts

• Homegrown migration scripts

• The NIS+ Gateway upload tool

All these tools perform the same function. That is, each tool takes input in the from the /etc files or NIS/NIS+ maps and converts them to LDAP entries. To understand how this translation takes place, the following topics are covered in this chapter:

• "Mapping Naming Service Data to LDAP Entries" on page 286

• "Running ldapaddent" on page 288

• "Importing Other Databases" on page 300

• "LDAP to NIS+ Gateway" on page 309

The focus of this chapter is on using the ldapaddent command to populate your directory. Some migration scripts are available on the http://www.padl.com web site. These are written in Perl and can be modified and redistributed as long as the copyrights in the source files are maintained .