CentOS Directory Server On CentOS 5.2

The enterprise-class Open Source LDAP server for Linux. It is hardened by real-world use, is full-featured, supports multi-master replication, and already handles many of the largest LDAP deployments in the world. The Centos Directory Server (based on Fedora Directory Server) can be downloaded for free and set up in less than half an hour.

OS Installation

Install a minimal server plus the xserver.
Important: Set FQDN of your server (/etc/hosts)

CDS Installation

Installing the CentOS Directory Server packages (ref: http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/DirectoryServerSetup)

1. The CentOS Directory server is currently (30-July-2008) in the Testing Repository for CentOS-5. After downloading the CentOS-Testing.repofile, edit it and add this entry in the [c5-testing] section:

exclude=java-1.7.0-icedtea

2. Install the directory server with this command:

yum --enablerepo=c5-testing install centos-ds

Note: This fetches about 57 MB of data, openjdk being the biggest (~35Mb). See if you could keep a backup of it while in the process of yum or configure yum to retain the binary packages after installation. (pkg location: /var/cache/yum/...).

3. After install of the directory server, install these required support packages:

yum install xorg-x11-xauth bitstream-vera-fonts dejavu-lgc-fonts urw-fonts

Official Installation documentation: http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/CDS/install/8.0/.

Post Installation Configuration

Before proceeding any further configure the JAVA environment server that comes with with Java ready installed. You need to change the paths. This is what I did (not nice I know) but you get away with this. Change the name of java/javaws to something else e.g:

mv /usr/bin/java /usr/bin/old_java

mv /usr/bin/javaws /usr/bin/old_javaws

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0/jre/bin

setup-ds-admin.pl

Choose from the three options:

1- Express

2-Typical

3- Custom

Follow the guidelines & you're done (it does automatically start the services in the end, i.e. /etc/init.d/dirsrv & dirsrv-admin).

After that to get to the Java based GUI console, run:

centos-idm-console

Congratulations! You're done.

Trouble Shooting

If you need to recreate the instance from all over again, i.e. you messed up in setup-ds-admin.pl, do the following:

Delete these files (instance being the initial instance you created e.g. <servername>):

Stop the services before you delete the stuff (/etc/init.d/dirsrv & dirsrv-admin).

rm -rf all the slapd-<ur instance name> & after this you can re-run the setup-ds-admin.pl.

File or Directory     Location
-------------------------------------
Log files         /var/log/dirsrv/slapd-instance
Configuration files     /etc/dirsrv/slapd-instance
Instance directory     /usr/lib/dirsrv/slapd-instance
Database files         /var/lib/dirsrv/slapd-instance

Runtime files