Playing with Technology

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. ~Arthur C. Clarke

Using LDAP with Apple Mail

I have been trying to connect my Apple Mail client to Wooster’s LDAP directory off and on for the past four years. Initially it just wasn’t possible. Then after 10.4 it was supposed to be possible but I just couldn’t get it to work. It turns out that everything in the LDAP setup in Address Book needs to be lowercase. Our networking group had given me the organizational units and organization names with initial caps and I guess I just never thought to change them. So if anyone else has been trying to connect Apple Mail to their organization’s LDAP, try making everything lowercase.
For people at Wooster you can use the following when setting up LDAP in Address Book.

  • Server: ldap.wooster.edu
  • Port: 389
  • Search Base: o=wooster this will make all people affiliated with Wooster searchable (Student, Staff, Faculty, Alumni)
  • Scope: Subtree
  • Authentication: Simple
  • User Name: cn=yourusername,ou=yournovellcontext,ou=yourrole,o=wooster (e. g., cn=jbreitenbuch,ou=math_cs,ou=faculty,o=wooster)
  • Password: yournovellpassword

What I’d like to do is find a way to limit the search base to just students, faculty, and staff, but entering ou=staff,ou=student,ou=faculty,o=wooster didn’t seem to work. This is probably because you can only go down one branch of the tree at a time. Doing something like ou=student,o=wooster does work and will only search LDAP for students. So creating an LDAP entry for each search base (ou=student,o=wooster; ou=staff,o=wooster; and ou=faculty,o=wooster) should allow one to search for everyone but alumni. If anyone happens to try this and has trouble just leave a comment.