HOWTO : OpenLDAP 2.4 Users & Groups Management and PAM Authentication on CentOS 6.2

Today we will create and manage users and groups in our OpenLDAP 2.4 daemon running on a CentOS 6.2 machine. Recall our goals :

1. Install OpenLDAP 2.4.
2. Configure Transport Layer Security (TLS).
3. Manage users and groups in OpenLDAP.
4. Configure pam_ldap to authenticate users via OpenLDAP.
5. Use OpenLDAP as sudo's configuration repository.
6. Use OpenLDAP as automount map repository for autofs.
7. Use OpenLDAP as NFS netgroup repository again for autofs.
8. Use OpenLDAP as the Kerberos principal repository.
9. Setup OpenLDAP backup and recovery.
10. Setup OpenLDAP replication.

HOWTO : CentOS 6.2 OpenLDAP 2.4 Setup

This blog post will show how to install and configure OpenLDAP 2.4 on CentOS 6.2.

Goals

1. Install OpenLDAP 2.4.
2. Configure Transport Layer Security (TLS).
3. Manage users and groups in OpenLDAP.
4. Configure pam_ldap to authenticate users via OpenLDAP.
5. Use OpenLDAP as sudo's configuration repository.
6. Use OpenLDAP as automount map repository for autofs.
7. Use OpenLDAP as NFS netgroup repository again for autofs.
8. Use OpenLDAP as the Kerberos principal repository.
9. Setup OpenLDAP backup and recovery.
10. Setup OpenLDAP replication.

Why vi(1) uses the hjkl keys as arrow keys?

Here's an interesting blog post by Peteris Krumins which explains why the vi(1) text editor inventor, Bill Joy, chose to use the HJKL keys as arrow keys in his software. And thus why we still use them today.

David

OT : very nice earth images from the international space station

Off Topic!

This Flikr stream is from an Italian astronaut which photographed our planet from the international space station (ISS). Enjoy magisstra's photostream !

David

Visio Stencils Collection

Many of us rely on Microsoft© Visio in our daily work as systems administrators and architects. To create elaborate and good looking Visio documents, one relies on Visio Stencils. Finding the right stencil can be problematic. This is the reason of this blog post : to help others find good stencils. Here's my list of favorite websites which offer Visio stencils for free...

• Solutions to Technology : one of the most complete set of stencils I've ever found.
• Cisco Visio Stencils : Cisco© stencils directly from the manufacturer.
• SonicWall Visio Stencils : if you happen to work with SonicWall products, that's what you need.
• Jean Dion Visio Stencils : a good place for Sun Microsystems stencils.

HTH,

David

MacOS X 10.7 Time Machine Backup to FreeBSD Server with Netatalk

UPDATE : This documentation still works, but it uses netatalk version 2 and is more complex than using version 3. Please consider using this documentation using netatalk version 3 instead. 

If you backup your MacOS X 10.6 machine to a netatalk server, then you may have found that MacOS X 10.7 cannot backup to the same machine. Apparently, the major reason why it's now broken is a lack of « replay cache » which was introduced in AFP 3.3. So what you need to do is upgrade netatalk to version 2.2.x.

UPDATE : I've successfully this setup with MacOS X 10.8 and 10.9.

Let's configure a FreeBSD machine to serve as a Time Machine target for MacOS X 10.7. I'm using FreeBSD 8.2 as this is the production version. If you prefer using a Linux machine, then take a look at this blog post by Steffen L. Norgren.

The Origin of the word Daemon

Here's an interesting short article on the origin of the word « daemon ». I've copied the entire article below. Enjoy!