OpenLDAP

OpenLDAP has many pros, among those the centralization of information, the simplicity of account management and the repetition of information among several servers, meaning that it will be necessary only  to log-in once (and therefore to remember only one username and one password) in order to access to all the qualified services.

OpenLDAP has been adopted by the major Linux distributions and is above all used for the authentication in the distributed calculation environments, besides it supports workflow management, provides quick answering times and allows the repetition of the information.

The project is handled by a community of volunteers from all over the world who use Internet to communicate, plan and develop the OpenLDAP suite and the related documentation. 

The OpenLDAP suite contains:

• slapd, stand-alone LDAP daemon for the directory personalization;
• slurpd, stand-alone LDAP daemon, that provides a replication service with slapd;
• libraries that implement the LDAP protocol;

• various utilities and tools.

LDAP is a lightweight protocol that is meant to access to thedirectory services based on X.500, a standard, which defines the hierarchical structure of the several levels of information categories like country, state, city.

The LDAP directory service is based on a client-server model. One or more LDAP servers contain data, which form a directory information tree. The client connects to the servers and ask for information, the server accepts the request and answers.