Introduction LDAP, or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, is a protocol for managing related information from a centralized location through the use of a file and directory hierarchy. It functions in a similar way to a relational database in certain ways and can be used to organize and store any kind of information. LDAP is commonly used for centralized authentication. In this post, we will cover how to install and configure an OpenLDAP server and how to encrypt connections to OpenLDAP using STARTTLS to upgrade conventional connections to TLS on an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Prerequisites Setting the Hostname and FQDN We should set up our server so that it correctly resolves its hostname and fully qualified domain name (FQDN). This will be necessary in order for our certificates to be validated by clients. We will assume that our LDAP server will be hosted on a machine with the FQDN of vive.example.com To set the hostname, use the hostnamectl command with the set-hostname option. $ sud...
