 | Level: Intermediate Sean A. Walberg (sean@ertw.com), Senior Network Engineer
23 Oct 2007 In this tutorial, Sean Walberg helps you prepare to take the
Linux Professional Institute® Senior Level Linux Professional (LPIC-3)
exam. In this first in a series of six tutorials, Sean introduces you to
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) concepts, architecture, and
design. By the end of this tutorial, you will know about LDAP concepts and
architecture, directory design, and schemas.
Before you start
Learn what these tutorials can teach you and how you can get the most
from them.
About this series
The Linux Professional Institute (LPI)
certifies Linux system administrators at three levels: junior
level (also called "certification level 1"), advanced
level (also called "certification level 2"), and senior
level (also called "certification level 3"). To attain
certification level 1, you must pass exams 101 and 102. To attain
certification level 2, you must pass exams 201 and 202. To attain
certification level 3, you must have an active advanced-level
certification and pass exam 301 ("core"). You may also pass additional
specialty exams at the senior level.
developerWorks offers tutorials to help you prepare for the five
junior, advanced, and senior certification exams. Each exam covers
several topics, and each topic has a corresponding self-study tutorial
on developerWorks. Table 1 lists the six topics and corresponding
developerWorks tutorials for LPI exam 301.
Table 1. LPI exam 301: Tutorials
and topics
| LPI exam 301 topic | developerWorks tutorial | Tutorial summary |
|---|
| Topic 301 | LPI exam 301 prep: Concepts, architecture,
and design | (This tutorial.) Learn about LDAP concepts and architecture,
learn how to design and implement an LDAP directory, and learn
about schemas. See the detailed objectives
below. | | Topic 302 | LPI exam 301 prep: Installation and
development | Coming soon. | | Topic 303 | LPI exam 301 prep: Configuration | Coming soon. | | Topic 304 | LPI exam 301 prep: Usage | Coming soon. | | Topic 305 | LPI exam 301 prep: Integration and
migration | Coming soon. | | Topic 306 | LPI exam 301 prep: Capacity planning | Coming soon. |
To pass exam 301 (and attain certification level 3), you should:
- Have several years experience with installing and maintaining
Linux® on a number of computers for various
purposes.
- Have integration experience with diverse technologies and
operating systems.
- Have professional experience as, or training for, an
enterprise-level Linux professional (including having
experience as a part of another role).
- Know advanced and enterprise levels of Linux administration
including installation, management, security, troubleshooting,
and maintenance.
- Be able to use open source tools to measure capacity planning
and troubleshoot resource problems.
- Have professional experience using LDAP to integrate with
UNIX® and Microsoft® Windows® services,
including Samba, Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM),
e-mail, and Microsoft Active Directory directory service.
- Be able to plan, architect, design, build, and implement a
full environment using Samba and LDAP as well as measure the
capacity planning and security of the services.
- Be able to create scripts in Bash or Perl or have knowledge of
at least one system-programming language (such as C).
The Linux Professional Institute does not endorse any third-party exam
preparation material or techniques in particular.
About this tutorial
Welcome to "Concepts, architecture, and design," the first of six
tutorials designed to prepare you for LPI exam 301. In this tutorial,
you learn about LDAP concepts and architecture, how to design and
implement an LDAP directory, and about schemas.
This tutorial is organized according to the
LPI objectives for
this topic. Very
roughly, expect more questions on the exam for objectives with higher
weights.
Objectives
Table 2 provides the detailed objectives for this tutorial.
Table 2. Concepts, architecture,
and design: Exam objectives covered in this tutorial
| LPI exam objective | Objective weight | Objective summary |
|---|
301.1
Concepts and architecture
| 3 | Be familiar with LDAP and X.500 concepts. | 301.2
Directory design
| 2 | Design and implement an LDAP directory while planning an
appropriate Directory Information Tree to avoid redundancy.
You should have an understanding of the types of data that are
appropriate for storage in an LDAP directory. | 301.3
Schemas
| 3 | Be familiar with schema concepts and the base schema files
included with an OpenLDAP installation. |
Prerequisites
To get the most from this tutorial, you should have an advanced
knowledge of Linux and a working Linux system on which to practice the
commands covered.
If your fundamental Linux skills are a bit rusty, you may want to first
review the
tutorials for the LPIC-1 and LPIC-2 exams.
Different versions of a program may format output differently, so your
results may not look exactly like the listings and figures in this
tutorial.
System requirements
To follow along with the examples in these tutorials, you need a Linux
workstation with the OpenLDAP package and support for PAM. Most modern
distributions meet these requirements.
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