openldap + kmail

[Timothy Murphy]

Craig White wrote:

>> Is anyone successfully using openldap to maintain an address book?
> ----
> sure - lots of them

I've seen many discussions of this,
but never seen an actual example of an ldap address book
working with KDE kontact/kaddressbook.

>> 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.
> ----
> 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.

I'm no expert in openldap,
but I don't see why kaddressbook doesn't use the LDAP DN
specified in the KAddressBook->LDAP Lookup 
when creating the LDIF.

Or at least it could ask you what DNs you want to use.
 
> 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

That's more or less exactly what I do.
But I don't think it should be necessary.

>> 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?

> 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.

Is it possible to do that?
Could you be a bit more specific please?
I thought one needed to include the host 
(ou=People,dc=www,dc=xyz,dc=com in my case)?