LDAP Services

[jshinall]

Does Bluehost currently offer LDAP hosting services? If not, are there any plans to implement this?

I'd really love to be able to access the same address book using Thunderbird from work and home without running an LDAP service on my computer at home.

If Bluehost doesn't and won't offer this, does anyone have any ideas what might fulfill this desire?

Thanks!

[jct]

I'm interested in the same thing (for the same reason, incidentally).

Are there any plans to have this kind of function through Fantastico? Does anyone know of a good open source app to use?

Cheers,
-john

[jdh]

Well, I can't presume what Bluehost's future plans are, but since LDAP is a bit more than a web-site solution, I don't expect we'll see anything through Fantastico.

LDAP would be another *nix-based service that would need to be installed on the server, probably using something like OpenLDAP.

However, it's important to remember that LDAP is just a directory access protocol, so you would actually need an underlying directory in order to support it.

Most LDAP-based services out there are either back-ended on an Active Directory, eDirectory, or iPlanet type of service, which is probably beyond the scope of what Bluehost wants to offer. I suppose you could do LDAP against a MySQL table, but that would probably still tend to get complicated.

[alligosh]

LDAP is actually a neat protocol, but is quite complicated to do what we would want/need in this environment. I would actually like to do something like that, but I don't have the two to three weeks to set it up, much less the potential developer time.

And yes, you can read that in Admin timescale, and not Programmer timescale (which are totally different beasts; They operate on different Einsteinian priciples, different time dialation and compression metrics, etc, but that is a different discussion). All of this means that it really would be an undisturbed few weeks to set up, and not Rando's "I don't know if it would be feasable" stuff.

;)

[jct]

Quite interesting...

I would say there's more important things in life than having a perfectly sync'ed address book, but it's nice to hear you're thinking about it ;)

Thanks for the good service!
-john

[caudilet]

I wanted to use LDAP for my web site authentication management. Do you have any suggestions as to an alternative mechanism permitted by bluehost?

Thanks in advance!

[teknodan]

I don't suppose there's been any movement on this...

Any chance something like this would work? http://rolodap.sourceforge.net/

Thanks!
--D

[nielsenx]

I know it's been a while since anyone has spoken of ldap on here, but is there any chance that bluehost is trying to compile openLDAP support into php? Or are there any other hosts out there that have this?

I have a web application I'm developing that uses ldap for authentication and it would be a pain to have to use perl's Net::LDAP module to do the authentication for php.

[Early Out]

Have you asked BH support? We're just users, so we don't know what BH is, or is not, planning to do.

[nielsenx]

Yes I had a conversation with a BH scripting support member about it, he had some trouble compiling openLDAP under his normal account (no root privileges) and suggested that I could try doing that if I wanted. So I looked into solutions to the compile problems but even if I could compile it I would have to rebuild php on the server to include the ldap module which I certainly wouldn't be able to do. And so he asked an admin if he could set it up and got no for an answer.

So basically I was wondering if anyone else wanted ldap and php from bluehost and found a solution for this or if they found another host who can do it? It seems that bluehost doesn't really care about trying to make this work, since it's a fairly straight forward install that anyone with admin privileges can do.