Directory services is one of the most interesting and crucial parts of computing today. They provide our account management, basic authentication, address books and a back-end repository for the configuration of many other important applications.
It's been nine long years since Craig Swanson and Matt Lung originally wrote their article "OpenLDAP Everywhere" (LJ, December 2002), and almost six years since their follow-up article "OpenLDAP Everywhere Revisited" (LJ, July 2005).
In this multipart series, I cover how to engineer an OpenLDAP directory service to create a unified login for heterogeneous environments. With current software and a modern approach to server design, the aim is to reduce the number of single points of failure for the directory.
In this article, I describe how to configure two Linux servers to host core network services required for clients to query the directory service. I configure these core services to be highly available through the use of failover pools and/or replication.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/openldap-everywhere-reloaded-part-i