What is LDAP used for?

Question

I know that LDAP is used to provide some information and to help facilitate authorization.

But what are the other usages of LDAP?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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 3

LDAP is just a protocol to access structured information. LDAP has standardized local and remote access to information whereas in case of database there is only standardized local access and remote access is proprietary.

LDAP server is optimized for search operation and database for transactions(Insert/Delete).

For more information refer following link:

http://www.itszero.in/2013/09/what-is-ldap-ad-adam.html

Answer 4

LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. As the name suggests, it is a lightweight protocol for accessing directory services, specifically X.500-based directory services. LDAP runs over TCP/IP or other connection oriented transfer services. The nitty-gritty details of LDAP are defined in RFC2251 "The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (v3)" and other documents comprising the technical specification RFC3377. This section gives an overview of LDAP from a user's perspective.

What kind of information can be stored in the directory? The LDAP information model is based on entries. An entry is a collection of attributes that has a globally-unique Distinguished Name (DN). The DN is used to refer to the entry unambiguously. Each of the entry's attributes has a type and one or more values. The types are typically mnemonic strings, like cn for common name, or mail for email address. The syntax of values depend on the attribute type. For example, a cn attribute might contain the value Babs Jensen. A mail attribute might contain the value babs@example.com. A jpegPhoto attribute would contain a photograph in the JPEG (binary) format.

How is the information arranged? In LDAP, directory entries are arranged in a hierarchical tree-like structure.

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.