Third Party Applications July 26, 2004 at 7:49 pm

LDAP Contact Database Utility

Great application to help you manage LDAP address books.

Don’t get your hands dirty with LDIF files, use this app to migrate your contacts from Address Book.app to your LDAP database. Get Address Book 4 LDAP here.Take a look at the documentation on the site. Mr. Hartner has done a very good job of outlining the use of the application and LDAP in general.

When you move your contacts into your LDAP database there is a couple of schools of thought on where to put them.

1. In the same place as your user records. In this method you would just add LDAP info to your existing user records, and possibly add in other contact-only records. This is a reasonable solution if your contacts are primarily your users.

2. In the cn=people container. Apple already created this container in your LDAP database for the purpose of sharing contact information. Put your contacts here and you’ll keep them entirely separate from your user records. Personally, this is my preferred way of sharing contacts.

3. You can run an entirely separate LDAP database. The AB4LDAP documentation does a decent job of covering how to run OpenLDAP on a client machine just to hold addresses.

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  • Trying to connect to an OD Replica?


    Changing the world, one server at a time.

    Joel Rennich
    http://www.afp548.com

  • Does anyone know if there is a "Getting started with AB4LDAP for complete
    LDAP-n00b lamers" guide or something like that? Or does anyone feel like
    making one? 😛

    I’ve got our Xserve running with OD and all, but I a complete newbie when it
    comes to ldap. I’m a GUI guy. I know, rtfm and so on. But I’ve tried. I don’t get
    it. I’m stuck at the first window:
    http://j2anywhere.com/downloads/ab4ldap/Help/node10.html

    I don’t want to mess our server up, so I’m not gonna go with the "trial and
    error" method here.

    Any tips?

    • Refer to the link below to see how I got AB4LDAP 0.0.15 to work with OS X
      10.4.5 Server’s OD. I’m not using SSL. I had a first tried using an Alpha
      version, but couldn’t get it to work. The stable 0.0.15 is the way to go. Also,
      AB4LDAP needs to be installed on the same computer that Address Book is
      on.

      Screenshot of Prefs

      I also found the built-in help to be very helpful.

      I believe if you use cn=users instead of cn=people in the “Context” field that
      AB4LDAP will add records to the same directory that OD uses for its users,
      which isn’t what I wanted.

      The uid in the “Bind DN” field should be the short name of your LDAP admin,
      and the Password is the respective password.

      You can see your changes by using LDAP Browser/Editor.

      It took me a bit of fooling around to figure this out so I hope it helps
      someone.

      Gary

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