LAST - LDAP Administration Super Tool
This is *very* new software. It's really still being prepared for public
consumption. If you don't know at least a little perl, things will not
make sense. Not even a little bit.
This is not, to steal a phrase from Qmail-LDAP, "point and click and then it
works ware". You need to be very familiar with your directory, and familiar
with perl to get much out of the software at this stage. I'm trying to make
that better, but you have been warned.
Mailing Lists!
If you're going to use LAST, you should join the mailing lists. It's
under heavy development, so it would be a good thing to keep up to date,
as sometimes nasty bugs creep in.
There are two lists:
LAST-Announce
(Archive)- Ultra-Low traffic; for keeping people up to date on new verisons of
LAST
LAST-Hackers
(Archive) - For users and developers of LAST. The program is not at a point
yet where anyone whose using it doesn't qualify as a hacker; so
join this list if you use LAST on a regular basis, or want to help
out.
What's New?
LAST 0.7-beta
- Major LdapObject module internal changes; should result in much
faster code. 0.8 will have more drastic changes.
- Fixed bug in lastmod that would create ".pm" files with invalid
names.
- Makefile enhancements; detection of required modules. (Thanks James!)
- Added ability to specify what port LDAP runs on. Just add "$ldapport"
to last.conf if you want to change the port number.
- Many Bugfixes.
LAST 0.6.1-beta
- Alan fixed bug in lastmod to accept values of 0. Values of 0 will
still cause problems though, as the code uses boolean checks all
over the place. We're working on it.
- Fixed show-stopping new bug that stopped any fields from being printed
on the "Add an Object" form.
LAST 0.6-beta
- Fixed bug in correctly accepting multi-valued cgi fields. (Checkbox,
multivalued select boxes)
- Fixed bug in correctly deleting fields; my code was overly
complicated, and caused problems with textarea's. (Some fields would
not delete the last entry)
- Fixed bug in lastmod to correctly format modules that did not
contain any allowed fields.
- Fixed admin.cgi to allow a value of "none" for fields; internal
checks previously relied on this behavior to indicate when a field
should not have a value at all. It now accuratly uses "".
- Many more bugfixes that I can't remember right now.
LAST 0.5-beta
- Bugfixes galore. Especially in "lastmod", and inputtransform
routines.
- Now uses CGI::EncryptForm! No more Crypt::TripleDES.
- Added "Display Names" for fields; so they can be more descriptive than
just the field name. (See the demonstration for examples)
- Added the ability to specify the value seperator for mutlivalued
fields. This means, specifically, that you can have a "textarea" widget,
where each line is an entry. Or, if you hate the "#" symbol, you can use
any other character (or string of characters) you choose.
- Added a new htmltype, "displayonly". This lets you show the
default fields in the "view" window. (See the demo)
- Added a "Modify This Object" button to the view screen.
(Thanks, Alan Sparks!)
Still reading? Cool.
LAST is a set of perl modules and a CGI script. It's designed to let you
define the attributes of the different types of objects in your diretory,
and then add/modify/delete/search them.
It does more than that, though. It also lets you define regular expressions
or custom subroutines to ensure that fields have proper values; or apply
subroutines to the value of a field to transform it's value. (Encrypt a
password, for example). Want javascript field completion and form value
checking? No problem, define the script in the module.
There are lots of web-based scripts for playing with your directory.. they
all fall short in that they are far too generic. This one let's you be
as generic or as specific as you want; all within the confines of one
CGI script. :)
Okay, so there are a few things that is doesn't do very well:
- It uses LDAP simple authentication; I highly recommend that you
don't pass the authentication requests across the public internet.
- It relies entirely upon the ACL restrictions you set in your directory.. this is fine (It Works for Me), but it should just be some authentication
modules.
- It burns my toast *every single time*.
It is in use every day at InfoSpace and
Cyber Trails. It has yet to do nasty
things like corrupt our data.. but we make no garuntees.
Sorry, the demo is offline due to hardware failure. It will return
ASAP.
You want the beta tarball, so you can start looking at the source and
playing around? No real documentation, no long instructions, no real
help at all?
Okay.. here you go:
last-0.7-beta.tar.gz
Please, write adam@sysadminsith.org
with any suggestions, new modules, etc.
Adam