openldap + kmail

[Craig White]

On Wed, 2008-04-23 at 14:52 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Is anyone successfully using openldap to maintain an address book?
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sure - lots of them
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> As far as I can see, if you save kaddressbook data in LDIF format,
> the resulting file has to be extensively modified
> before it becomes acceptable to openldap.
> 
> Eg the DN of a typical entry in the LDIF file reads
>         dn: cn=Andrew Ryan,mail=aryan27 at tcd.ie
> which openldap certainly will not like.
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it's not openldap that *wouldn't like this* - it's that there is nothing
that says that an ldif file that program X creates in an 'export'
operation will match up to the restrictions imposed by your LDAP
setup...which is generally the case.

all you need to do is to figure out a way to edit (sed/awk/perl/?) this
ldif in a way that matches your setup so that you can import these
things without a problem.

for example... 
while this isn't likely to work...
  dn: cn=Andrew Ryan,mail=aryan27 at tcd.ie
this could conceivably work...
  dn: cn=Andrew
Ryan,mail=aryan27 at tcd.ie,ou=AddressBook,dc=gayleard,dc=org
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> What puzzles me about this is that the issue must be one
> which occurs to many people.
> How is one meant to keep a "global" address book under Fedora?
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Well, since Kmail is a 'write' capapble LDAP client, it is possible to
simply create an empty LDAP 'organizationalUnit' for an address book and
add entries directly via Kaddressbook. This of course insists that you
comport with specific rules such as entries that absolutely require an
'sn' attribute (last name), etc.
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> Incidentally, the KMail handbook claims that there is some way
> of using MySQL with the address book,
> but I have never seen any explanation of how to do this.
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I can't help you there...never tried

Craig