Right-click somewhere in the schema panel and choose ‘new schema’. Open Apache DS Studio and create a new project. Our schema’s only object clas is the Book class, with these attributes: We are going to define a simple schema which will enable us to store information about books in our LDAP server. You only need to have Java 5 or higher installed.ĭownload DS Studio 1.5 from here and follow the instructions to install it. And the project contains a well structured client LDAP Api which can also be used to connect to other LDAP servers.Īpart from its stand-alone LDAP server, Apache DS also provides an administration gui called Apache DS Studio.Īpache DS Studio can also function as a LDAP server and it has an LDAP schema IDE which is based on the Eclipse framework.īecause we are going to write our own schema in this blog we’ll install DS Studio. Want to read more about LDAP? Here’s a nice link: Īpache DS is not so well known and fully featured as some other LDAP servers: Most noticably Microsoft Active Directory and OpenLDAP.īut it has a few nice advantages: It is written in Java and therefore runs on many platforms. Some examples are DHCP and Microsoft Address Book. Object classes define a set of required and optional attribute types.Įntries inherit from one or more object classes: And finally a collection of objectclasses and their allowed attribute types is called a schema.Īn advantage of using a predefined schema to represent your data is that external clients won’t have any trouble understanding what your object classes and attribute types mean. The name of a key and the form and type of the data in its value depends on its attribute type. A distinguished name is a string which consists of one or more comma-separated key-value pairs which together uniquely identify the node.
Nodes are called ‘entries’ and contain data as key – value pairs.Įach entry is identified by its distinguished name (DN). LDAP servers store their data in the form of a tree., called the DIT (Directory Information Tree).
In this article I’ll show you how to set up your own LDAP server using the open source Java based Apache DS server. Today it is mainly used for authentication but you could use it to make almost any kind of information available in your network.
The LDAP protocol has been around for quite a while.