Newbie question: setting userPassword field

["Dan" <dan@fatcanary.com.au>]

Hi there,

I'm wondering if somebody can help me out - I'm new to LDAP in general, and
even newer to OpenLDAP, so please be gentle :)

I'd like to use OpenLDAP to store a list of accounts for accessing secured
parts of an Apache web server, and wish to be able to administer these
accounts using a Java applet that I'd write.  Setting up Apache is easy -
there are lots of LDAP modules for it.  Creating new account entries is also
easy - there is already a good Java LDAP browser that does this.

My prob is the userPassword field.  I wish for this field to be stored and
retrieved in an encrypted format.  The idea is that the administrator
creates an account and simply types in the user password in the app window,
and it gets encrypted when it is stored.  I've seen that OpenLDAP can store
password in a {crypt}sdf3245wr fashion.

My question is simply this: can I send the server an unencrypted password,
then automatically have it encrypt it for storage, and will subsequent
authentication attempts automatically correctly compare against the
encrypted password?

If it's not as simple as this, can anybody suggest an approach I could take
to add passwords to the system, given the fact that I'd like to stick to
Java clients?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers,
D.