On Fri, 03 Dec 2004, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ted Zlatanov wrote: >> LDAP is essential if you plan to run a serious mail server. There's >> very few alternatives to a well-managed LDAP server for your user >> user directory. > > There appears to be a trend towards using SQL databases, particularly > MySQL for this. From a programmer's perspective, rather than a sys > admin. perspective, I find it easier to wrap my brain around MySQL. > > I would assume the big functionality you loose out on through the SQL > approach is that all the mail clients don't know how to query it as a > user directory (corporate phone/email directory). I imagine someone has > probably written an LDAP-to-SQL gateway that should address that.
LDAP servers can be replicated - it's part of the protocol. It has its own query language, etc. so it's really the best choice today for a company-wide directory because it's the closest thing to a standard for that purpose. OpenLDAP specifically has a SQL backend that can talk to MySQL, so no special gateways are needed. Depending on the directory size this may be fine. Perl can be used to push updates from MySQL to LDAP when they occur, which is a lot more efficient so you can keep the LDAP directory on local disk instead of a MySQL database. This is what I've done at our site. Ted _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
