One day Minnie was was in the library when she saw Mickey
Minnie – Hey Mickey
Mickey – Hi Minnie, How are you
Minnie – I am good, where have you been all week
Mickey – I was here, at the library
Minnie – Wow, doing some research?
Mickey – Not really, I just wanted to know about LDAP
Minnie – Oh that’s easy
Mickey – You know it, will you teach me?
Minnie – Sure, let’s go
Minnie – Let’s go to the good olden days. What would you do if you need to get your TV repaired?
Mickey – I will call a TV repair shop
Minnie – Right, but how will you get the number of the TV shop
Mickey – I can check in a Telephone Directory
Minnie – Exactly, to find a service in your area, you look up a Telephone directory
In the same way, LDAP helps to look up information from a directory or services running on a server
Mickey – I need examples
Minnie – Okay going back to the TV shop examples, What information will you look up in the telephone directory
Mickey – Well, I will see the name, address, phone number, cost per hour, experience, etc
Minnie – Yes, similarly LDAP can hold information on different properties of the records or services
Mickey – Tell me more
Minnie – LDAP is short for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol and was developed at the University of Michigan around 1993, by Tim Howes, Steve Kille, Colin Robbins, and Wengyik Yeong.
Mickey – Wow
Minnie – In short, LDAP is an internet-ready version of an earlier protocol called X.500, which was developed back in the 80s by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) for managing telephone directories and directory services.
Mickey – More
Minnie – Okay so just remember this
• LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol.
• It is an internet protocol for accessing distributed directory services
Mickey – What is directory Services
Minnie –
- A directory is a tree of entries
- Every entry has a unique name in the tree.
- An entry is a set of attributes.
- An attribute is a key/value pairing
Let’s visualize:
o: organization
ou: stands for organizational unit – are objects act as containers that hold other objects
cn: is short for common name. An example would be “John Smith”
sn: short for surname.
Let’s say we wanted to look at the record cn=john:
Mickey – What is dn
Minnie – All names in a directory tree are actually referred to as a distinguished name, or dn for short. A dn is comprised of attributes that lead to that node in the tree, as shown above.
Mickey – Okay so this directory service is available online and LDAP helps to find or access any of the directory services
Minnie – You got it
So LDAP is a protocol to allow easy, efficient and safe access to directories and records online
- Performing more complicated searches
- Accessing records
- Inserting records
- Moving records
- Making secure connections (Authentication)
Mickey – I feel so good now
Minnie – Great wanna go for some shopping
Mickey – No let’s go to the beach and watch the sunset
Minnie – Good plan
Mickey – You are my best friend Minnie
Minnie – I am always here for you 🙂
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References
https://serverfault.com/questions/23685/what-is-ldap
https://www.sitepoint.com/essentials-ldap-php/
http://ldapjs.org/guide.html
