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What about X.500?
What about X.500?
Next: SASL Up: LDAP Previous: How does LDAP work?
What about X.500?
Technically, LDAP is a directory access protocol to an X.500 directory service, the OSI directory service. Initially, LDAP clients accessed gateways to the X.500 directory service. This gateway ran LDAP between the client and gateway and X.500's Directory Access Protocol (DAP) between the gateway and the X.500 server. DAP is a heavyweight protocol that operates over a full OSI protocol stack and requires a significant amount of computing resources. LDAP is designed to operate over TCP/IP and provides most of the functionality of DAP at a much lower cost.
While LDAP is still used to access X.500 directory service via gateways, LDAP is now more commonly directly implemented in X.500 servers.
The stand-alone LDAP daemon, or slapd(8), can be viewed as a lightweight X.500 directory server. That is, it does not implement the X.500's DAP. As a lightweight directory server, slapd(8) implements only a subset of the X.500 models.
2005-05-04