Sounds like that book is very much out of date. It's a shame,
Addison-Wesley contacted me a year or two ago about writing an OpenLDAP
book and I didn't have time to pursue it. One of these days...
I'm in the process of writing one.
The degree of polish in the tools and docs is somewhat immaterial in the
end. You still need to be well-versed in X.500 and LDAP to make
effective use of a directory, no matter who the software comes from. You
still need expertise or support, but with OpenLDAP you don't need to pay
ludicrous per-entry license fees. Bottom line - there are many
businesses out there migrating to OpenLDAP, away from
Sun/Netscape/iPlanet/Novell/whatever.
Yep, the biggest hurdle to using LDAP effectively is understand what it
is, and what it is not.
I was thumbing through the pages of an LDAP book in the bookstore and
came across a paragraph about OpenLDAP, which said:
"...I personally know of people who have done significant testing and
prototyping work using these products. However, I know of nobody who has
yet trusted them to support his or her business applications. Bottom
line: If you want to play with compiling and modifying your own LDAP
server, this is a good place to start."
This is discouraging, as I had planned to put OpenLDAP into production,
after evaluating eDir and, to a lesser extent, the Sun product. Aside
from GUI tools and docs (which I don't have a particularly dire need
for), where is OpenLDAP lacking compared to eDir and Sun? Why shouldn't
I put this into production?
We've been using OpenLDAP in production since 1.2.x. It powers
authentication, authorization, mail delivery, DNS, DHCP, address books,
etc... Never had slapd crash, not once.