J. Vidrine says he is about to commit a new name service switch (NSS) implementation for FreeBSD. This will enable applications such as authenticating with an LDAP server. The new implementation preserves the nsdis.patch(3) interface, and consumers of nsdispatch continue to work without modification. In addition to NSS core, he is also committing completely new implementations of the getpwent(3) and getgrent(3) family of functions. Also see these articles and documentation and Luke Mewburn’s notes on nsswitch for FreeBSD for more details.
On another FreeBSD-related article, check this one over at OnLamp: “Introducing DHCP for FreeBSD“.
The DHCP article looked good, but didn’t include the bit that stumped me the first time. If you have a wireless card, and need to set the SSID or the WEP key, but are using DHCP, you need to do that setup in /etc/dhclient-enter-hooks. I think it’s a common enough case to suggest a new command for rc.conf, but it’s simple enough once you know that that’s what you need to do (the clean way, anyway).
“Finally a version of FreeBSD that can fully participate in directory managed networks.”
Now NIS can start to rest in peace 🙂 Hope it spreads to Open and NetBSD, so all major OS would support LDAP authentication.