Intro
The main reason why I went throught the trouble of setting up LDAP on my Fedora box was to create a central place for my addressbook. The main application that is going to use the address book is Thunderbird, so I decided to try to import the Thunderbird schema into my directory.
Importing the schema
http://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:LDAP_Address_Books
Download the mozillaOrgPerson schema. The schema in the link is missing some properties: company. So we need to add those manually, or rather to a supplementary schema.
I found another schema to cover for all the other stuff Thunderbird is exporting mozillaAbPersonObsolete schema
Copy it to etc/openldap/schema. Add an include directive to slapd.conf and restart ldap.
Hmmm
Some think it is very bad idea to have a proprietary schema for Mozilla: http://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews_Talk:LDAP_Address_Books. A pretty convincing statement. However, in the standard schemas a lot of address book attributes are not available. I suppose that is why Mozilla defined their own schema, as did Microsoft.
Their seems to be no "official" schema for address books yet. Still I want to realize the highest possible interoperability with non-mozilla clients. So the mozilla schema will not be used.
We need to do some mapping with available attributes. See Mapping from AddressBook to LDAP.
Importing the data
The Thunderbird Address Book has an option to export to LDIF format. But the result sucks.
dn: cn=Tom Delay,mail=kickback@tx.house.gov objectclass: top objectclass: person objectclass: organizationalPerson objectclass: inetOrgPerson objectclass: mozillaAbPersonObsolete givenName: Tom sn: Delay cn: Tom Delay xmozillanickname: tommy mail: kickback@tx.house.gov modifytimestamp: 0Z
- replace mail= with a proper container in the directory like ou=personaladdressbook,o=boplicity,dc=boplicity,dc=nl
- delete objectclass: mozillaAbPersonObsolete and modifytimestamp: 0Z
Client applications
Unfortunately the LDAP support of Thunderbird is read only, so I need to find a simple way to edit the LDAP entries. One option is to use a web based tool http://phpldapadmin.sourceforge.net/.
Resources
- The OpenLDAP community: http://www.openldap.org/
- Very helpful http://applications.linux.com/article.pl?sid=05/05/18/1248224&tid=37
- Web based LDAP tool: http://phpldapadmin.sourceforge.net/.