Daenney's blog

This post is part of a series on directory services. Current available installments are: Introduction Terminology Basic concepts Designing the DIT Setting up an LDAP server Securing your LDAP server Writing and testing ACLs ACLs, access control lists, are an important aspect of running a directory service. ACLs are how you control who can access which parts of the DIT and what things they can do. You can limit certain things like which attributes one can read or write.

This post is part of a series on directory services. Current available installments are: Introduction Terminology Basic concepts Designing the DIT Setting up an LDAP server Securing your LDAP server Writing and testing ACLs I apologise for the long delay between posts. Life took over for a while and I never got around to writing the rest of it. Sitting down and thinking a bit about the DIT upfront can save you endless hours of furstration later on.

I have a pretty standard Prometheus, bunch of exporters and Grafana setup at home. This is mostly used to monitor different aspects of my house, like the exporter I have for power usage. However, while trying to figure out the cause of a node exporter crash I found myself in need of an alerting system, so that it could tell me when the node exporter crashed instead of me just checking on a daily basis to see if it had.

One area Linux has made quite a lot of progress in is the ability for people to get firmware and BIOS updates for their devices. This used to be a massive PITA but thanks largely to the Linux Vendor Firmware Service and its associated tooling (fwupd, fwupdmgr) this has become a lot simpler. Quite a few vendors support this nowadays and deliver firmware and BIOS updates through LVFS. Most of this is thanks to @hughsie so if you run into him, say thank you or offer him a drink!

With my XPS 13 up and running I ran into some issues with the Dell WD15 (USB 3) dock. It mainly caused my display manager to crash whenever I would plug it in with (with my external screen attached), except after a fresh boot. This is of course wildely unhelpful but a colleague told me many folks had issues with the USB 3 version of the dock and to get a TB16 (thunderbolt) instead.

After about 3 years it was time to refresh my hardware. Though I’ve long used MacBook Pro’s as my daily drivers the new MBP with touchbar wasn’t getting me excited and the new keyboard feels downright awful to me. So, I decided this was going to be the year of the Linux Desktop and I’ve switched to a Dell XPS 13 (9360, Kaby Lake) Developer Edition (comes pre-loaded with Ubuntu).

As you might’ve noticed from other blog post entries I’m suddenly all into directory services. This happens b/c that’s what I’m currently working on. As such I find myself needing to manipulate data in a DIT quite a bit and writing ldif’s by hand is not my idea of fun. Instead I set out to create a small library that would essentially allow me to parse the result of LDAP search result entries into a Go struct and transform those back into add or modify operations.

This post is part of a series on directory services. Current available installments are: Introduction Terminology Basic concepts Designing the DIT Setting up an LDAP server Securing your LDAP server Writing and testing ACLs Directory Services are fundamentally pretty simple. All information they contain is stored in a hierarchical tree structure, called the DIT. Within the DIT entries can be nested into or beneath each other, creating this tree-like structure.

In this series of posts I want to talk about directory services. The directory allow you to model things like people, computers, groups and their relationships in a central database. This service can then be used for authenticating users, managing group memberships and a whole lot more. In many small environments people avoid the perceived complexity of directory services over manually managing and provisioning groups and users in systems. Though this can work really well, even on a small scale this can get annoying.

This post is part of a series on directory services. Current available installments are: Introduction Terminology Basic concepts Designing the DIT Setting up an LDAP server Securing your LDAP server Writing and testing ACLs Directory services come with a lot of terminology and part of that lingo is what makes things difficult to understand to someone who hasn’t heard any of it before. Below is a common list of terms you might run into in documentation and the rest of these posts and hopefully a simple enough explanation of what they mean.