Point and click

If you'd prefer a graphical tool, there are several that will let you explore and manage an LDAP directory. One such is LAT (LDAP Administration Tool) which is in the Ubuntu repositories, so installing it is a breeze: sudo apt-get install lat

Notice, though, that it's a .NET application so installing it will also drag in the Mono runtime if you don't already have it. LAT is a great little tool for managing users and groups, exploring and searching the directory and examining the schemas and I would strongly recommend you spend some time playing with it.

Other graphical tools worth looking at include phpLDAPadmin (web-based) and ApacheDirectoryStudio.

That concludes the first part of this tutorial. We now have an LDAP directory up and running that we can use as centralised identity store to authenticate against. Next month, I'll look at the client-side changes needed to actually use it. I also plan to look at the business of replicating the directory to avoid a single point of failure and/or to distribute the load. We'll also see how to set up an encrypted connection to the server using SASL.