Celejar wrote:
Your example of LDAP, OTOH, is an interesting one. I've tried more than once to grok LDAP, and given up in bafflement. I can't quite tell if it's inherently just overkill for my needs, or if my Google-fu is just insufficient to find a basic introduction to the system. [I'd be using it on my personal systems, to share contact information between different application and perhaps across several systems.] Every introduction I've seen involves creating from scratch complicated schema and doing quite a bit of planning and writing of files. This may be unavoidable, and LDAP may indeed be overkill for my minimal needs, or I may have merely been unable to find the appropriate docs. This supports your point that sometimes asking on the list might be appropriate even for subjects that return many Google hits.
To continue wandering off-topic, in the hope of learning something: yes, LDAP is grossly overspecified for email contact lists, but there appears to be nothing else. All email clients can use LDAP directories, but no other kind. So I run slapd on my Etch server purely to make a couple of dozen email addresses available to various machine/OS combinations on my network. That's not exactly a problem, but slapd is a greedy beast and seems to be a waste of resources for such a simple job.
And yes, there's not a huge amount to learn, but you have to learn all of it at once to get started on even the simplest job. Something I found was that there's no one way to do things in LDAP, which is a bit unnerving. Read half a dozen LDAP tutorials, and you find at least five slightly different approaches, which are not easy to reconcile. Quite a few different configurations and schemas will give the same result when you look up an email address from Thunderbird. Still, a Google on 'ldap address book tutorial' turns up quite a few results, from 'do this, this, and this' to some more explanatory texts.
You only really need the core and inetorgperson schemas, and I think the system also wants cosine and nis, but possibly the Debian default installation will put them in anyway. Your contact is basically an inetorgperson with most fields left blank, you don't need to add any further schemas unless you want to link some exotic data structure to the contact. You need a root domain, generally your email domain name being convenient, but it doesn't matter a lot. You probably want an Organisational Unit, for which I used 'Contacts', and since I never got round to using LDAP for anything else, was probably unnecessary. You need a name and password for the admin, and I think that's about it. There are various LDAP administrators and GUI address books to tweak entries, and it's not hard to work out a csv to ldif converter to migrate the addresses in. I use a few perl scripts to add and edit through a web browser, and only use an admin program if I need to do something a bit technical.
I've been looking for an LDAP/SQL contact gateway for years, but nobody else seems to want it and I don't really know enough to do a decent job of it myself. Contact LDAP queries are extremely simple, just returning a list of inetorgperson records, and I'm sure it shouldn't be hard to translate that to an SQL query, and reformat the response. MySQL is also greedy, but I run that for many purposes.
-- Joe