Beginning PHP and MySQL: From Novice to Professional, Third Edition

CHAPTER 17PHP and LDAP

As corporate hardware and software infrastructures expanded throughout the last decade, IT professionals found themselves overwhelmed with the administrative overhead required to manage the rapidly growing number of resources being added to the enterprise. Printers, workstations, servers, switches, and other miscellaneous network devices all required continuous monitoring and management, as did user resource access and network privileges.

Quite often the system administrators cobbled together their own internal modus operandi for maintaining order, systems that all too often were poorly designed, insecure, and nonscalable. An alternative but equally inefficient solution involved the deployment of numerous disparate systems, ...