LDAP Proxy :: Frequently Asked Questions
What is Symlabs LDAP Proxy?
Symlabs LDAP Proxy is a powerful tool to customize your identity infrastructure and to integrate it with your overall architecture. The LDAP Proxy was designed to overcome the limitations of identity data repositories and identity consuming applications by creating a highly versatile layer between them.
Symlabs LDAP Proxy provides extensive support for the LDAP protocol, allowing administrators and developers to improve LDAP availability and performance, while also providing a middleware layer that can manipulate requests and responses within the packets of data moving through the system. In this way, complex tasks such as merging together LDAP Trees, collecting auditing data, or simply adding a separate centralized security layer to a solution, become trivial.
Can you explain the features of the Symlabs LDAP Proxy?
Symlabs LDAP Proxy has an open platform that allows you to customize and program a wide variety of actions. Because of this, the number of things you can do with the Symlabs LDAP Proxy is virtually endless. The following is not a complete list, but it will give you an idea of how Symlabs LDAP Proxy is currently being used:
- Mapping of attributes, values and suffixes
- Joining of directory and identity data
- Triggering external actions
- Operation load balancing
- Integrating multiple directories
- Access control
- Operation target routing (i.e. route read requests to replicas, route write requests to master servers)
- Data distribution / Partitioning
- Creating virtual directories that span multiple data sources
- Validating data before it gets written to the Directory
- Enforcing referential integrity
- Failover
- Backend monitoring / health checking
- Extended operation filtering
- Filter processing
- And more
Does Symlabs LDAP Proxy come with a GUI?
Yes. Symlabs LDAP Proxy comes with a GUI configuration tool, called DSGUI, which has been developed in Java to ensure cross-platform compatibility. It was developed as a tool to assist administrators and developers with the creation and configuration of LDAP Proxy instances. The program effectively provides an intuitive graphical user interface to the configuration files that the LDAP Proxy uses, allowing end users to configure, start and test configurations with a few click and drag operations.
DSGUI can be used to manage configurations both locally and remotely. In order to better facilitate the remote management of configurations across multiple instance on several servers, DSGUI has been designed to interface with a specially developed Remote Administration Server that comes bundled with Directory Extender.
Symlabs Virtual Directory Server is built on the same core engine as Symlabs LDAP Proxy, what is the difference between these two products?
Yes, the two products are built using the same core. However, Symlabs LDAP Proxy has been built with limited functionality. In particular, while the Symlabs Virtual Directory Server is capable of handling a wider range of protocols, including the ability to interface with RDBMS backend, the LDAP Proxy product is limited to working only within an LDAP framework. Another major difference between the two products, is that with Symlabs Virtual Directory Server, you are able to define as many processing stages as you require; however, there is a limitation of a maximum of three processing stages within the LDAP Proxy product.
Do I need to run an X-Server or Windowing environment on my Unix-based server, in order to use your product?
Absolutely not! We understand that processing cycles are valuable and security is important. As a result, our core engine is capable of running without the GUI on any system. Additionally, we have built in a Remote Administration Server that you can choose to run if you would like to be able to access your configurations on an LDAP Proxy instance using the GUI remotely. This means that you can lock down access to your servers in a production environment, but still allow your administrators to remotely configure and maintain a running an LDAP Proxy instance. Furthermore, you administrators can make use of the DSGUI application within their own windowed environment, without needing a detailed understanding of the shell environment. This way, we keep the server running only what it needs to, but we still provide the GUI tools to be able to manage the server.
What about long-term support?
Symlabs is known for excellent customer service. We have many levels of support available (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum) and can customize a support solution tailored to meet your needs.
We are also constantly updating our online Symlabs LDAP Proxy tutorials and all of our software is packaged with the documentation that you require to be able to run and configure the application.
Symlabs products have been deployed by the leading telcos/carriers and large enterprise organizations that require top level service and support. Our products and services are here to stay and you can count on Symlabs to support you throughout every step of the process.
Which platforms can I use to try it?
You can download the product for Linux, Solaris SPARC and Solaris x86 (8, 9 and 10), and Windows (2003 Server or XP Professional recommended). Although not part of our official package list, if required we can provide packages of the product to run on AIX or HP-UX systems as well.