Managing OpenLDAP

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From the course by Google

System Administration and IT Infrastructure Services

1635 ratings

Google

System Administration and IT Infrastructure Services

1635 ratings

Course 4 of 5 in the Specialization Google IT Support Professional Certificate

This course will transition you from working on a single computer to a whole fleet. Systems administration is the field of IT that’s responsible for maintaining reliable computers systems in a multi-user environment. In this course, you’ll learn about the infrastructure services that keep all organizations, big and small, up and running. You’ll learn how to manage and configure servers, how to use industry tools to manage computers, user information, and user productivity. Finally, you’ll learn how to recover your organization’s IT infrastructure in the event of a disaster. By the end of this course you’ll be able to: - utilize best practices for choosing hardware, vendors, and services for your organization. - understand how the most common infrastructure services that keep an organization running work and how to manage infrastructure servers. - manage an organization’s computers and users using the directory services, Active Directory, and OpenLDAP. - choose and manage the tools that your organization will use. - backup your organization’s data and be able to recover your IT infrastructure in the case of a disaster. - utilize systems administration knowledge to plan improve processes for IT environments. Except as otherwise noted, the contents on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

From the lesson

Directory Services

In the fourth week of this course, we'll learn about directory services. Specifically, we'll cover how two of the most popular directory services, Active Directory and OpenLDAP, work in action. We'll explore the concept of centralized management and how this can help SysAdmins maintain and support all the different parts of an IT infrastructure. By the end of this module, you will know how to add users, passwords, and use group policies in Active Directory and OpenLDAP.

What is OpenLDAP?4:08

Managing OpenLDAP3:34

Meet the Instructors

Google

It's easy to manage OpenLDAP through a web browser and tool like phpLDAPadmin,

but you can also use command line tools to achieve the same result.

I'd recommend you look into setting up PHPLDAPadmin,

if this is your first set up with open LDPA.

For instructions about how to set up a PHPLDAPadmin,

check out the supplementary readings.

In this lesson, we're going to quickly run down a few other commands that will

allow you to add, modify and remove entries in your directory.

To begin using command line tools,

you need to use something known as LDIF files, pronounced LDIF.

We've already seen LDIF format or LDAP notation in action.

It's just a text file that lists attributes and

values that describe something.

Here's a simple example of an LDIF file for a user.

Even without understanding what the syntax of this file is saying,

we can infer that it's talking about an employee named Cindy

who works in the Engineering department at the company example.com.

We've talked a little bit what the attributes are referring to in

an earlier lesson.

But you can refer to the supplemental reading if you want to know

what the specific fields mean.

For our purposes here,

though, we just want to see a high level overview of how this works.

Once you've written your LDIF files, you're practically done.

Depending on what task you want to do to your directory,

you'd run commands like these.

Ldapadd, this takes the input of an LDIF file, and adds the context of the files.

ldapmodify, as you can guess, this modifies an existing object.

ldapdelete, this will remove the object that the LDIF file refers to.

ldapsearch, this will search for entries in your directory database.

It's not important to note the syntax of these commands,

you can always look up a syntax on official documentation.

But as you can see, it's not scary to work with OpenLDAP.

It operates in a very similar way to Windows Active Directory, or AD.

You can take this knowledge and

populate your directory just like you did in Windows AD.

If you're curious about the syntax of these commands,

check out the supplemental reading on using LDIF files and LDAP commands.

Again, if you're considering LDAP as your solution to your directory service needs,

I'd recommend looking into the web manager tool PHPLDAP admin that

we've included a link to in the next reading.

Just like Windows AD, this topic can be pretty extensive.

So think about which directory solution best fits the IT needs for

your organization.

There are lots of reasons why you might want to deploy

the help of a directory service like OpenLDAP or

Active Directory when working in a systems administration role.

Directory services are great for centralized authentication,

keeping track of where computers are in your organization,

who can access them and more.

Make sure to play around and familiarize with OpenLDAP or

PHLDAP admin to get a better sense of how these directory services work.

Checking out the official documentation is always a good place to start.

By now, if you've learned about all the essential IT infrastructure services.

The next topic we'll shift to is how to make sure all the hard work you've put

in to your IT infrastructure doesn't go to waste by learning about

disaster recovery and backups.

Your hard work is really paying off, high five to that.

Now take a moment to complete the quiz we put together for

you, then we'll meet you back in the next video.

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