Linux Administration - Users in (any) database howto/why...

[Joe]

Craig,

Thanks for the info on FreeIPA. It sounds like you have quite a bit of 
experience with LDAP. Maybe you can answer some questions.

In the past when I tried to configure LDAP with nsswitch, I remember 
that I had to put the Admin credentials in a file in /etc. Also, at the 
time ldap did not support ssl ( it was a long time ago :-) )

Can LDAP be used on client systems now where the credentials are secure? 
I didn't like the idea of having basically the root password in 
cleartext on every system. The same goes for using ldap to authenticate 
to an apache server. I would like to try again, but last time I spent 
weeks on getting it configured and found it easy to basically own the 
ldap server.