LDAP System Administration

Information Migration

While some organizations may have the resources (such as undergraduate work study students) to re-enter the data held in the NIS maps to the LDAP store, luckily, there are other means available. In addition to the PAM and NSS LDAP reference modules available at PADL Software’s web site, you’ll also find a set of Perl scripts designed to convert the various /etc system files (e.g., /etc/passwd and /etc/hosts) into LDIF format. Once you’ve converted the system files to LDIF, you can import them into your LDAP store either online using the ldapadd(1) command or by using an offline database creation utility such as the OpenLDAP slapadd(8c) tool. These LDAP migration scripts can be found at http://www.padl.com/OSS/MigrationTools.html.

After unpacking the migration scripts, you must customize the migrate_common.ph script to fit your network settings. Within this Perl script is a variable named $DEFAULT_BASE , which is used to define the base suffix under which the organizational units that will serve as containers for migrated information will be created.

The scripts accept input and output filenames as command-line parameters. If no output filename is present, the scripts write the converted entries to standard output. For example, the following command converts /etc/passwd into an LDIF file:

root# migrate_passwd.pl /etc/passwd /tmp/passwd.ldif

Here’s what a typical entry from /etc/passwd looks like after it has been translated:

dn: uid=gcarter,ou=people,dc=plainjoe,dc=org ...