Tech

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.

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.

After my post on LGBTQ in tech a lot of people reached out to me, thanking me for the post, with a lot of kind words and some even with a resounding “yes that’s me too”. It’s been heartwarming to see the support this story gathered and how the Puppet community, which is the one I interact with the most, reacted to it. Interestingly though some have raised the point that LGBTQ are not a minority in tech.

Most people who know me know I’m gay, or that I identify as gay or queer or whichever way you’re more comfortable phrasing or thinking about it. To put it bluntly: I like men, I date men, I sleep with men, I happen to be a man and it’s all good. The thing that struck me about tech when I started getting more involved in online communities is that no one cared about this fact.