Lightweight Directory Access Protocol

Abstract

In today’s distributed computing environment, directories are required to locate resources. This paper describes the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), an open network protocol standard designed to provide access to distributed directories. LDAP provides a mechanism to query or modify information that exists in a directory information tree (DIT). Any combination of ADSI, the LDAP APIs, or a user searching the Active Directory through the User Interface (UI) results in the LDAP protocol being placed on the wire as the client communicates with the DSA. Because LDAP is a protocol standard it manifests itself in the same manner on the network wire, regardless of how the query or modification was generated at the application layer. This paper provides the information: 1. LDAP Fundamentals introduces the four models that describe LDAP and presents additional concepts that are relevant to the understanding of LDAP. 2. Core LDAP APIs describes the fundamental APIs that are used to expose the LDAP protocol. It is important to remember that LDAP is a network protocol standard, not a defined API standard. While there exist well-known APIs to access the LDAP protocol, each API is vendor-specific. The goal of this paper is not to analyze the different vendor implementations of LDAP APIs, but rather to study LDAP from a network protocol point of view. 3. Interpreting LDAP errors. In addition to the RFC-defined errors that are returned by a Directory Sever Agent (DSA) to a client, additional error information may be obtained from a network trace. How to interpret that error information is the focus of the final section.

Cite this Article
Swati Bansal. Lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP). Journal of Advances in Shell Programming. 2016; 3(1): 1–11p.