what is LDAP used for

Question

I know that LDAP is used to provide some information and to help for example the authorization. But what are the other usages of LDAP? Thyk you very much.

Answer 1

Please RTM, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LDAP

Answer 2

That's a rather large question.

LDAP is a protocol for accessing a directory. A directory contains objects; generally those related to users, groups, computers, printers and so on; company structure information (although frankly you can extend it and store anything in there).

LDAP gives you query methods to add, update and remove objects within a directory (and a bunch more, but those are the central ones).

What LDAP does not do is provide a database; a database provides LDAP access to itself, not the other way around. It is much more than signup.

Answer 3

@mrwiki: I read it and it's not what I was searching for. But thx :)

Answer 4

LDAP is the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. Basically, it's a protocol used to access data from a database (or other source) and it's mostly suited for large numbers of queries and minimal updates (the sort of thing you would use for login information for example).

LDAP doesn't itself provide a database, just a means to query data in the database.

Answer 5

The main idea of LDAP is to keep in one place all the information of a user (contact details, login, password, permissions), so that it is easier to maintain by network administrators. For example you can:

• use the same login/passwd to login on an Intranet and on your local computer.
• give specific permissions to a group of user. For example some could access some specific page of your Intranet, or some specific directories on a shared drive.
• get all the contact details of the people in a company on Outlook for example.

Answer 6

To take the definitions the other mentioned earlier a bit further, how about this perspective...

LDAP is Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. DAP, is an X.500 notion, and in X.500 is VERY heavy weight! (It sort of requires a full 7 layer ISO network stack, which basically only IBM's SNA protocol ever realistically implemented).

There are many other approaches to DAP. Novell has one called NDAP (NCP Novell Core Protocols are the transport, and NDAP is how it reads the directory).

LDAP is just a very lightweight DAP, as the name suggests.

Answer 7

LDAP is also used to store your credentials in a network security system and retrieve it with your password and decrypted key giving you access to the services.

Answer 8

Well, there are LDAP servers and the LDAP protocol. Combined, it's a data store, or a database. It's not relational, but it's just a place to store data, and it's optimized to be efficient at reads more than writes. It doesn't support transactions.

Now, it happens to be very popular for storing credentials, but that's by no means its only purpose, and not its original purpose.