“Roaming is a feature that can really come in handy, as Nick
Petreley illustrated in a recent Penguin Brief. You can have your
Netscape bookmarks and preferences automatically synchronized and
ready to use, wherever you happen to be. In that article, Nick
showed us how easy it is to configure Apache to be a roaming
server. Here, I’ll show you another way to roam, by using OpenLDAP
in place of Apache.”
“First, let’s look at why you’d want to do this in the first
place. When might it make sense to use an LDAP server (like
OpenLDAP) instead of an HTTP server (like Apache) for roaming?
Well, if you have a lot of users already loaded into an LDAP
directory, you might like the simplicity of supporting roaming
profiles in the same place. You would get one-stop shopping for
user information: names, telephone numbers, email addresses, and
Web preferences. You also wouldn’t have to deal with setting up a
separate HTTP server for roaming.”
“On the other hand, using an HTTP server for roaming has its
advantages. HTTP servers are tuned to work with files, such as
bookmarks and other roaming preference files. LDAP servers aren’t.
Deploying an HTTP server for roaming would divert write traffic
associated with uploading preferences away from your LDAP server,
possibly preventing a performance bottleneck. And your HTTP roaming
server could still use your LDAP server for username/password
authentication (as is the case with the use of Apache’s AuthLDAP
module, for instance).”