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C H A P T E R 1 7
PHP and LDAP
As corporate hardware and software infrastructures expanded throughout the last
decade, IT professionals found themselves overwhelmed with the administrative
overhead required to manage the rapidly growing number of resources being added to
the enterprise. Printers, workstations, servers, switches, and other miscellaneous
network devices all required continuous monitoring and management, as did user
resource access and network privileges.
Quite often the system administrators cobbled together their own internal modus
operandi for maintaining order, systems that all too often were poorly designed, insecure,
and nonscalable. An alternative but equally inefficient solution involved the
deployment of numerous disparate systems, each doing its own part to manage some
of the enterprise, yet coming at a cost of considerable overhead because of the lack of
integration. The result was that both users and administrators suffered from the absence
of a comprehensive management solution, at least until directory services came along.
Directory services offer system administrators, developers, and end users alike a
consistent, efficient, and secure means for viewing and managing resources such as
people, files, printers, and applications. The structure of these read-optimized data
repositories often closely models the physical corporate structure, an example of
which is depicted in Figure 17-1.
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