LDAP server in Python

[Paul Moore]

Michael Ströder <michael at stroeder.com> writes:

> Moore, Paul wrote:
>> I'm looking at LDAP as a possible service for some projects, and
>> I'm struck by the fact that I know pretty much nothing about it.
>> On the basis that I always learn better by playing about with
>> things rather than just reading about them, I'd like to set up a
>> sandbox environment.
>
> Do you plan to develop an LDAP-enabled application?

No, not really.

> Then I'd recommend to run OpenLDAP 2.1.16 as test server because
> it's the most strict LDAP server around. You will definitely learn
> the right things.

Hmm. I'm not sure "strict" is what I want. The background is that
Oracle are moving their database naming service from a proprietary
protocol (Oracle Names) to LDAP. The trouble is that (as is usual with
Oracle) the documentation is a bit opaque, so I'd rather try it out
and experiment.

But Oracle's LDAP server takes a bit of setting up (specifically, it
needs a server machine bigger than my laptop :-() so I thought I'd try
something smaller and simpler for experimenting with.

My idea was that a Python implementation would be helpful as I could
follow the implementation if I needed to, to understand what was going
on.

> Hmm. Depends on what you're planning to do. If you plan to do serious
> development of LDAP applications you SHOULD test against the full
> stuff.

As you see, it's pretty much the opposite. When (if) I go live, it
will be with Oracle Internet Directory, or Active Directory, and I
won't have much choice. I'm just trying to get a feel for whether what
I can do with the client-side justifies the server-side pain, or
whether I should stick with Oracle Names until it's finally
desupported for good.

Oracle Names is basically a fairly trivial name->value mapping,
whereas LDAP looks far more complex. I'm not sure if I can justify the
extra complexity. On the other hand, I may be able to do useful extra
things with LDAP, such as storing extra data for other clients. At the
moment, none of the "overview" documents on LDAP which I've seen have
given me a feel for how to make "trivial" use of it (understandably,
they focus on the richness of the structure, which is precisely what
I'm not interested in...)

Thanks for your help, I'll certainly look at the compatibility website
you mentioned.

Paul
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