Many organizations are replacing their existing NIS infrastructure with the more reliable, scalable and secure LDAP system. In addition to providing the same services as NIS (user and group information retrieval, name service resolution, and FTP user authentication), LDAP also provides the following advantages:
- Improved accuracy, due to LDAP’s more frequent data synchronization of current and replicated data
- Communications encryption using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS)
- Authentication of connections to the LDAP database, instead of anonymous access to NIS databases
The server supports LDAP version 2 and 3 (the default is version 3), including two of the most common LDAP service implementations:
- Oracle Directory Server
- OpenLDAP