Use an LDAP server for identity and authentication management.
This is nss-pam-ldapd which provides a Name Service Switch (NSS) module that allows your LDAP server to provide user account, group, host name, alias, netgroup, and basically any other information that you would normally get from /etc flat files or NIS. It also provides a Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) to do authentication to an LDAP server.
This is implemented using thin NSS and PAM modules which delegate to a dedicated service (nslcd) that queries the LDAP server with persistent connections, authentication, attribute translation, etc.
The NSS module was originally a fork of nss_ldap with some structural design improvements. The most important features of nss-pam-ldapd are:
- light and simple NSS and PAM libraries
- avoid loading LDAP and SSL libraries in all programs
- separation between NSS, PAM and LDAP code
- fewer connections to the LDAP server
- better debugging possibilities
- better performance
See the documentation section for more details.