InDepth

After you have done the four preceding steps, your computer is ready to authenticate on the LDAP directory. But is your directory also ready? To prepare your directory for authentication, you need to put all relevant user attributes in it, all the information normally in /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow. Otherwise, how could you use your precious resources without a proper user ID and all the other nice things from these files? To get the information, you can use some Perl scripts specially created to get information out of the files on your computer and into the LDAP database, or you can make your own LDIF file to import the users you want.

If you want to do it all automatically, many Perl scripts are available at http://www.padl.org/. There are scripts to import almost all settings that can also be in an NIS database—your password files, your host file, your network file, etc. Before you can use them, however, you have to edit the general configuration file, migrate_common.ph. In this file you have to change some parameters that specify the location where the data has to be created. Especially important are DEFAULT_MAIL_DOMAIN and DEFAULT_BASE; they specify the DNS domain in which users have their e-mail accounts and the LDAP container in which users must be created, respectively. Once that's done, you can start the import. For each different kind of information, there's a separate script; probably the most interesting of them are migrate_all_online.sh, which imports all network information, and migrate_passwd.pl, which imports the users on your system.

The other way to get things done is by means of an LDIF file, the contents of which must be added to the database using ldapadd. The most important thing for this file is that all the right properties are specified. Listing 4 shows an example of how to ensure this.

Listing 4. Sample Property Specification for an LDIF File

There are only two disadvantages to this method. First, the home directory isn't automatically created when you create the user in the LDIF database, but there's a PAM module named pam_mkhomedir.so that can take care of it for you. The other problem is user passwords; there's no nice method to get them in encrypted form in the database. A less elegant way to accomplish this is to create the user once in /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow, give him or her a password and copy the encrypted string out of /etc/shadow and into your LDIF file.

Once this is done, you can try the whole thing out. Delete the user from your local files, open a login prompt and try to log in; it should work just fine.