CentOS user management through LDAP

centosldap

I set up my CentOS 5.3 server to authenticate off of LDAP and am able to add users manually through Apache Directory Studio 1.4. Now that this is setup, is there a preferred "CentOS Way" of managing users in LDAP? There is another thread that talks about general ways to do this, but none of those solutions are available in the default CentOS package repository.

Best Answer

No, there isn't an official "CentOS way" for managing users in LDAP. Which is a bit infuriating, since the default useradd/usermod/etc. tools only work with the default /etc/passwd scheme. The official LDAP server is openldap, and there are some basic command line tools available, but nothing that is out-of-the-box easy to use for user management. We use a web-based system called Gosa, another popular option is home-grown scripts built on top of the command-line LDAP tools.