Sun™ ONE Messaging Server: Practices and Techniques for Enterprise Customers

Direct LDAP Lookup

Prior to version 5.1 of the messaging software, the MTA did not have the ability to directly look up information in the Directory Server via LDAP. Rather, the MTA had a small cache of information, such as user IDs and mail addresses, that was periodically synchronized against the Directory Server. This was originally done when Directory Server performance was not as good as it is today. Now that the Directory Server is able to keep up with the requests from the Message Server, the MTA's cache is redundant and becomes a bottleneck, as well as adding administrative overhead. You may also hear the term dirsync used to describe the process or the daemon that is run to synchronize the data between the Directory Server and MTA's ...