We at CSH need to move from nis and the many other user information datastores we use to using LDAP instead. To that effort, I have started working on merging our data informations. The first step is importing NIS (passwd/group) information into ldap.

I wrote a script, passwd2ldif, to use NIS passwd information and put it in ldap.

ypcat passwd | ./passwd2ldif > cshusers.ldif
ldapadd -D "cn=happyrootuserthinghere,dc=csh,dc=rit,dc=edu" -f cshusers.ldif

Wait a while, and all users from NIS show up in ldap. I have my laptop looking at ldap for user informatin using nss_ldap:

nightfall(~) [690] % finger -m psionic
Login: psionic                          Name: Jordan Sissel
Directory: /u9/psionic                  Shell: /usr/bin/tcsh
Never logged in.
No Mail.
No Plan.

Pretty simple stuff, so far. Next step is going to involve creating a new schema to support all of the information we currently store in "member profiles." Member profiles is a huge mess of a single mysql table with lots of columns such as "rit_phone," "csh_year," "aol_im," and others. All of that can go to ldap. I'll post more on this later when I figure out what kind of schema we want.