Saturday, August 21, 2010

LDAP

The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is an application protocol for querying and modifying data of directory services implemented in Internet Protocol (IP) networks.

A directory is a set of objects with attributes organized logically in a hierarchical manner. A simple example is the telephone directory, which consists of a list of names (of either persons or organizations) organized alphabetically, with each name having an address and phone number associated with it.

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A directory information tree often reflects various political, geographic, and/or organizational boundaries, depending on the model chosen. LDAP deployments today tend to use Domain Name System (DNS) names for structuring the topmost levels of the hierarchy. Deeper inside the directory might appear entries representing people, organizational units, printers, documents, groups of people or anything else that represents a given tree entry (or multiple entries).

The latest version of LDAP is Version 3, which is specified in a series of Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Standard Track Requests for comments (RFCs) as detailed in RFC 4510

Protocol overview

A client starts an LDAP session by connecting to an LDAP server, called a Directory System Agent (DSA), by default onTCP port 389. The client then sends an operation request to the server, and the server sends responses in return. With some exceptions, the client does not need to wait for a response before sending the next request, and the server may send the responses in any order.

The client may request the following operations:

§ Start TLS — use the LDAPv3 Transport Layer Security (TLS) extension for a secure connection

§ Bind — authenticate and specify LDAP protocol version

§ Search — search for and/or retrieve directory entries

§ Compare — test if a named entry contains a given attribute value

§ Add a new entry

§ Delete an entry

§ Modify an entry

§ Modify Distinguished Name (DN) — move or rename an entry

§ Abandon — abort a previous request

§ Extended Operation — generic operation used to define other operations

§ Unbind — close the connection (not the inverse of Bind)

In addition the server may send "Unsolicited Notifications" that are not responses to any request, e.g. before it times out a connection.

A common alternate method of securing LDAP communication is using an SSL tunnel. This is denoted in LDAP URLs by using the URL scheme "ldaps". The default port for LDAP over SSL is 636. The use of LDAP over SSL was common in LDAP Version 2 (LDAPv2) but it was never standardized in any formal specification. This usage has been deprecated along with LDAPv2, which was officially retired in 2003.

LDAP is defined in terms of ASN.1, and protocol messages are encoded in the binary format BER. It uses textual representations for a number of ASN.1 fields/types, however.

Directory structure

dn: cn=John Doe,dc=example,dc=com

cn: John Doe

givenName: John

sn: Doe

telephoneNumber: +1 888 555 6789

telephoneNumber: +1 888 555 1232

mail: john@example.com

manager: cn=Barbara Doe,dc=example,dc=com

objectClass: inetOrgPerson

objectClass: organizationalPerson

objectClass: person

objectClass: top

Saturday, August 14, 2010

IP Addressing A Simplified Tutorial

Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) is a methodology of allocating IP addresses and routing Internet Protocol packets. It was introduced in 1993 to replace the prior addressing architecture of classful network design in the Internet with the goal to slow the growth of routing tables on routers across the Internet, and to help slow the rapid exhaustion of IPv4 addresses.

IP addresses are described as consisting of two groups of bits in the address: the most significant part is the network address which identifies a whole network or subnet and the least significant portion is the host identifier, which specifies a particular host interface on that network. This division is used as the basis of traffic routing between IP networks and for address allocation policies. Classful network design for IPv4 sized the network address as one or more 8-bit groups, resulting in the blocks of Class A, B, or C addresses. Classless Inter-Domain Routing allocates address space to Internet service providers and end users on any address bit boundary, instead of on 8-bit segments. In IPv6, however, the host identifier has a fixed size of 64 bits by convention, and smaller subnets are never allocated to end users.

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