NSS LDAP
Introduction
Penrose can be used as the name service for Linux machines using NSS LDAP (nss_ldap). See Naming Service for Linux.
Installing NSS LDAP
Some system comes with NSS LDAP installed already. If your system doesn't have it already, you need to download and install the binaries.
Red Hat:
yum install nss_ldap
Debian:
apt-get install libnss-ldap
Alternatively, you can build from the source code:
./configure make make install
Configuring NSS LDAP
The NSS LDAP can be configured in /etc/nsswitch.conf.
For users and groups information (including authentication), you need to add "ldap" to the following databases:
passwd: files ldap group: files ldap
Note that for authentication, NSS LDAP will retrieve password from Penrose and then perform the authentication locally. This behaviour is sometimes undesirable because of security concerns. You can avoid this problem by adding PAM LDAP. Instead of retrieving the password, PAM LDAP will execute a bind operation against Penrose. See PAM LDAP.
There are other databases too that you can configure as needed:
hosts: files dns ldap ethers: files ldap netmasks: files ldap networks: files ldap protocols: files ldap rpc: files ldap services: files ldap netgroup: files ldap