LEX Online Manual Content

Connecting to LDAP Servers

In this section of the LEX manual, we discuss how to establish a conection to an LDAP server. Whenever such a connection is to be made, the LDAP connection dialog is used for this. Because you might not want to enter the configuration settings for a connection each time, it is possible to save connection profiles to disk and re-use it later on. So the important topics in this section are:

Additionally, there is another topic about LDAPS / LDAP over SSL, because the need for certificate handling is often a problem in getting a secured LDAP connection up and running.

What information about the server/directory do you need to connect to an LDAP server?

That's quite simple. You will need the following:

1. What is the network name or address of the regarding LDAP server?
2. What communication port number does the LDAP server use?
3. Will the connection be TLS/SSL-encrypted (is this supported by the server)?
4. What are the user name and password to connect to the LDAP directory?
5. What is the LDAP path of the container where the browsers base will be?

That's all - that are the important 'must-have' settings. Even some of these settings can be automatically detected in some environments... The other configuration parameters which can be found in the connection dialog and which will be explained in the according topics here are 'nice-to-have' settings which specify the following:

- Additional browse filters if you want to see only certain objects but not all
- The kind of authentication method (can be automatically detected in most situations)
- Additional settings for handling of large numbers of objects in the directory
- Additional settings for handling of linked attribute pairs
- Additional settings for handling certificate problems in SSL/TLS connections
- The basic network protocol (TCP or UDP)
- The set of attributes which will be shown as value columns in the object list
- The set of attributes which will be shown in the attribute list