Tom, I agree completely with you. OpenLDAP veterans all swear there is sufficient documentation, but to us "noob" junior admins, there is virtually no documentation that helps me actually build a working server. Theory does me no good if I never see it in action.

I'm the IT manager for a small company, and we do not have LDAP here. I can't see it in action. We use M$ servers. I'm in a position to replace them with linux servers, and they let me learn linux here at work. However, I'm having great difficulty getting past the rookie level.

I have been trying to learn samba+ldap for several months now, and although I have made some progress, I still can't seem to get things working right.

I own and have read the above mentioned book LDAP System Administration, which only has a few pages talking about getting samba to work. I have also read the OpenLDAP v2.3 Admin Guide, which also makes some mention, but not enough. I have also read the samba docs samba3-howto and samba3-byexample, and the samba book by R. Smith. They cover samba quite well, but do not go into enough detail integrating into ldap.

As I see it, the problem is not ldap documentation, or samba documentation, or suse documentation (the distro I'm working on). Theres plenty of theory documentation around. It's a total lack of integration documentation that teaches me how to get ldap and samba to work together, on an opensuse (or any distro) server. If you google for samba+ldap howto's, sure there are some out there for various distro's, but none of them really teach you anything. They all assume you already know how to do it, and list some sample config files, and say tweak to your liking. I bring up howto's because there are NO books (that I can find) that teach you the hows and whys for actually building an ldap server integrated with samba on a specific distribution.

For instance, I found ONE howto for opensuse 10.1 configuring samba+ldap. It is poorly written, has bad suggestions, and will not work on opensuse 10.2. There are NONE for 10.2. I found a debian script that automates everything for me. If I was a debian fan, it wouldn't really help me learn, unless I want to read every line of code. Sure I could learn it that way, but that would take an extremely long time, since I am hardly a coder yet.

As for support, the linux forums are full of people asking questions, but most answers come from other noobs asking the same questions. It doesn't help me to post a question, then get five people telling me to RTFM!

I am learning at a snails pace, and at times I wonder if I can maintain the enthusiasm to finish learning all this stuff. It is very frustrating.

Tom, you brought up a valid point that applies to more of us than you may realize. I wonder if you are in a position to help us out. Maybe somebody on your team can address some specific scenario's, such as a opensuse10.2+ldap3+samba3+mail+squid+vpn+http+mysql howto :)

I've been documenting what I've learned, and I intend to release a howto when everything works. I wish there were some veteran admins that were good at writing, and would make the effort to write one. It would probably be very easy for them to write. They would be helping probably thousands of people that are trying to learn what they know.

Until then, my addiction to coffee continues to thrive...

I've been an LDAP administrator for a long time, since OpenLDAP version 1.2.x, which is awhile. :) And I've heard the claims about bad documentation *FOREVER*. And to be blunt, it simply isn't true. LDAP is well documented. For some reason Open Source people tend to only view HOWTOs as documentation; books about LDAP in general are consistently ignored while people go on and on about not understanding schema, partitions, terminology, etc... It is the result of a kind of blindness, not a shortage of documentation. If you take the time to learn about LDAP then things in specific services like OpenLDAP make more sense and seam more intuitive. Building a directory service is no trivial thing to taken on lightly; my employer took three years to bring everything under the umbrella of our Dit. It was certainly worth it as LDAP is a wonderfully flexible and robust technology. But skip all the HOWTOs and learn about LDAP first.