LDAP
About
The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) 1) is an application protocol for querying and modifying directory services running over TCP/IP.
It's a lightweight replacement (complement) for X500 Directory Access Protocol (DAP) (1993 for International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization (ITUT) )
The LDAP application is often the master piece of the authentication process for the software in a centralized security management. The software which is configured with LDAP authentication send to it the user and the password given in the login screen and wait a response (positive of negative) from it.
Ldap is defined in a number of rfcs (indexed at RFC 4510).
In essence it is simply a way of working with a directory and offers such function:
- Connect to a directory (with varying levels of security)
- Read the entries in a directory
- Write entries in a directory
- Search a directory
- Rename entries in a directory
- Delete entries in a directory
A LDAP directory is a tree structure made up of entries.
ldif is the exchange format when you want to export/import entries.