We store information on our systems in LDAP for a variety of reasons.
* Many existing applications (Postfix, Puppet) can use LDAP data
* LDAP tools are pre-installed on most systems
* It's available in most scripting environments (Shell, Python, PHP, Perl)
* The data can be viewed and edited in many ways (including plain- text)
* The data's structure is more flexible than a spreadsheet or RDBMS
* We're going to have an LDAP server anyway (for authentication)
* It's easy for people to read and gather information
* It's easy for machines and automated processes to read and gather information
And yes, much of our bb-hosts file is generated from data in LDAP. :)
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Rob McBroom
<http://www.skurfer.com/>;