System wide address book

[christoph.lukas]

Hi,

I would like to set up an address book, which should be accessible by every user on our scalix system.

Therefore I set up a public calendar folder and made it accessible for all users. Works fine so far.

The only problem with this approach is that I have found no way to access this folder through LDAP.
I have seen that the SYSTEM address book and the personal contacts folder are accessible through LDAP and are configured in the scalix's slapd.conf file.

Is it possible to make our public calendar folder accessible via LDAP in the same manner?

Or does anybody know a better way to do this?

Thanks for any hints,
Christoph

[Valerion]

Add the users directly to the SYSTEM address book. You can create an external user by configuring an "Internet User" on SAC, or with omaddent from the CLI.

[christoph.lukas]

Hi Valerion,

thanks for your hint.

The drawback of your suggested solution is that there is now frontend available for the users to add new entries.

This is why I thought of making a public contacts folder accessible via LDAP.

One solution might be to setup a special Scalix user and to make it's private contacts folder accessible for every user.

But the scalix slapd.conf file lets me think if there is a way to configure LDAP access to a folder other than the personal contacts folder.

Probably something like:

Code: Select all

database        om
suffix          "o=Contacts"
flatSuffix      "o=Contacts"
directory       _PUBLIC\ FOLDERS/Contacts_
sizelimit       1000
timelimit       100
useDit          false
engines         10


But I have no idea what the directory directive should look like. I did not find any man page or documentation about this.

Probably anyone from Scalix can tell us what configuration options are available there?

Thanks in advance,
Christoph

[mikevl]

Hi

You can always use public fiolders as a simple option
You can create a Contacts list there!

Mike

[christoph.lukas]

Hi Mike,

yes, we are using a public folder as system wide address book for some time now. The problem is that these folders are not accessible via LDAP.

This would be necessary to support clients like Thunderbird or Mac Adressbook.

Thanks anyway,
Christoph

[mikevl]

Hi Christoph

Hmmm Yep you are then restricted to using a system type directory. You can create your own directories as described on page 124 of the Admin guide. This may help you out.

Mike

[christoph.lukas]

Hi Mike,

this looks promising. I have created a new Scalix directory named 'CONTACTS' and made it accessible via LDAP by modifying the slapd.conf file.

This should make it possible to add users in evolution and probably Mac Addressbook.Thunderbird is still not able to write to LDAP directories AFAIK.

The new directory can also be made searchable in swa through editing swa.properties.

The only minor problems remaining:
* Users can not add contacts in SWA
* Evolution users have to create an additional Ldap address book.

I am wondering what would happen if I would remap the MYCONTACTS stuff in slapd.conf to the newly created CONTACTS directory?
Would the SWA and evolution 'Contacts' folder be also mapped to the Scalix CONTACTS directory?

Might be worth a try. But I should probably try this in a non production environment.

Thanks a lot for your hint,
Christoph

[Valerion]

The LDAP server only gives a view into the internal directory, it does not allow updates to happen. If you want to, you can create a frontend for this by one of two methods:

1) Use CAA (documented in the latest API guide) to write entries via the SOAP interface. You will likely have to create a web frontend for this, or some application.

2) Use the Request Server. You can then create an email address that will automatically execute a script and add/delete the required address when it receives an email. There are some examples in /opt/scalix/examples/req/

[christoph.lukas]

Hi Valerion,

The LDAP server only gives a view into the internal directory, it does not allow updates to happen.

Hm. If I setup the omslapd as frontend for a system directory (eg.CONTACTS) I can use ldapadd and ldapdelete to add and delete entries inside the directory.
But you probably were talking about the 'MYCONTACTS' Ldap stuff.

Additionally to your two possible solution I thought of:

* Setting up a standalone openldap
* telling openldap to use the perl backend
* implement a simple perl backend which communicates whith Scalix via Imap

Thanks,
Christoph

[Valerion]

Sorry, I wasn't very clear there ldapadd and ldapdelete works, but it's not always as well supported, as you found out I prefer to mange this from the server's side, rather than the client side, especially if you are not sure if support is 100% implemented.

Your idea could work as well. Instead of imap I would use the Scalix command-line tools directly, though (om*ent, especially).