Installation

In this section, we will walk through the process of installing on a system running Ubuntu Linux 7.04. Later, Ubuntu distributions will likely follow the same installation pattern.

Dependencies

The basic OpenLDAP configuration in Ubuntu requires a few extra libraries and packages. These are as follows:

  • The Berkeley Database (bdb4) version 4.2 (but not 4.3, which has stability issues): In the Ubuntu default configuration, OpenLDAP stores the directory inside a BDB database. The Berkeley Database is often simply called BDB.
  • The OpenSSL libraries: These provide SSL and TLS security. SSL and TLS provide encryption for network connections to the directory.
  • The Cyrus SASL library: This provides support for secure SASL authentication.
  • The Perl programming language: This can provide custom back-end scripting.
  • The iODBC database connectivity layer: OpenLDAP can store the directory in a relational database (RDBMS). The iODBC library is used to connect to the RDBMS.

OpenLDAP also relies on some standard system library packages (such as libc6) that are installed on all UNIX/Linux distributions. In its default installation, Ubuntu includes BDB, OpenSSL, and Perl. Installation of other dependencies is handled automatically by the package manager, so don't worry about manually installing any of these.

Installing OpenLDAP

Like many other distributions, Ubuntu breaks OpenLDAP up into small packages. The daemons (slapd and slurpd) are packaged in the slapd package. The clients are packaged in ldap-utils, and the libraries are packaged in libldap-2.3-0. When Ubuntu 7.04 was released, OpenLDAP version 2.3.30 was provided. As security fixes are made, Ubuntu may release newer versions via online updates. While legacy 2.2.26 packages are still available, they should be avoided.

To install Ubuntu we can use the Synaptic graphical installer or any of the command-line package management utilities. For the sake of simplicity, we will use apt-get. This will download all of the necessary packages (including dependencies) from the official Ubuntu repository and install them for us. Note that installing this way will require access to the Internet (or, alternatively, to some other form of Ubuntu distribution media, such as a CD-ROM). We need to run the following command.

  $ sudo apt-get install libldap-2.3-0 slapd ldap-utils

It may take a little while for the packages to download and install.

Once apt-get is done, the LDAP server and all of its clients should be installed. Next, we will begin the process of configuring the SLAPD server.