What is LDAP?

Answer 1

LDAP means Light-Weight Directory Access Protocol. It determines how an object in an Active directory should be named. LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is a proposed open standard for accessing global or local directory services over a network and/or the internet. A directory, in this sense, is very much like a phone book. LDAP can handle other information, but at present it is typically used to associate names with phone numbers and email addresses. LDAP directories are designed to support a high volume of queries, but the data stored in the directory does not change very often. It works on port no. 389. LDAP is sometimes known as X.500 Lite. X.500 is an international standard for directories and full-featured, but it is also complex, requiring a lot of computing resources and the full OSI stack. LDAP, in contrast, can run easily on a PC and over TCP/IP. LDAP can access X.500 directories but does not support every capability of X.500 ANSWER B: The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, or LDAP is an application protocol for querying and modifying directory services running over TCP/IP.[1]

A directory is a set of objects with attributes organized in a logical and hierarchical manner. The most common example is the telephone directory, which consists of a series of names (either of persons or organizations) organized alphabetically, with each name having an address and phone number attached.

An LDAP directory tree often reflects various political, geographic, and/or organizational boundaries, depending on the model chosen. LDAP deployments today tend to use Domain name system (DNS) names for structuring the topmost levels of the hierarchy. Deeper inside the directory might appear entries representing people, organizational units, printers, documents, groups of people or anything else that represents a given tree entry (or multiple entries).

Its current version is LDAPv3, which is specified in a series of Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Standard Track Requests for comments (RFCs) as detailed in RFC 4510.