Title: Time to replace the LDAP schemas in RFC 2307 
Tags: nuug, english, debian edu, debian
Date: 2009-03-29 12:00
Publish: 2010-01-01

The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from optimal.
In Debian Edu, we would like to store information about users, SMB
clients/hosts, filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS
configuration, and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a
lot in common, but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to
have one object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least
three LDAP objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related
stuff, one with DNS information and another with DHCP information.  In
addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for netgroup
membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.  I believe
it is time for a few RFC specifications to cleam up this mess.  The
old RFC 2307 do not scale when it comes to netgroups, and the schema
used by DNS servers and DHCP servers do not integrate properly with
RFC 2307 and each other.

I would like to have one computer object representing each computer in
the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
(mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.

I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or computer
and to the net group this user or computer is a member.

Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself in
this regard.  Time to start a new IETF work goup?