OpenLDAP Proxy Server Configuration

Introduction

In this article, we are going to configure LDAP proxy server. As proxy server it will not contain its own database but retrieve data from the Master LDAP server and serve that data to the clients. So client will not contact to actual LDAP server which help in lower down the load on the master server and our master server will remain hidden behind the proxy server. Bellow is the pictorial representation of the same. In which client is asking for data from proxy server and proxy server is serving data on  behalf of the master server.

1) Installing the required LDAP packages on Proxy server.

~]# yum install -y openldap openldap-servers openldap-clients

We are not going to configure LDAP server but we will require above packages in order to configure ldap proxy.

2) Configuring LDAP Proxy:

First, step is  to delete all the configuration related files from slapd.d directory.

Make sure that owner is ldap if it is root change it to ldap. Also, add entry of master server in hosts file and connectivity between master and proxy server.

We have to create slapd.conf file to tell the proxy server that its not the LDAP server it will act as a proxy server instead. Create slapd.conf file with bellow contents:

After generating above file make sure that ownership is of  ldap user. Then start slapd service.

In above configuration what we have done is we have loaded all the default schema. Specified path to modules. We have keep database as ldap not BDB or HDB and added URL of the master server from which to fetch the data. 

Now  last step is to verify our configuration on client side. 
Check in my  previous articles How to configure LDAP server and How to configure LDAP client.
In bellow, Screen We are querying ldapsearch on proxy server which does not contains any data instead it takes data from master server and serves to client. As our cache settings stores data on proxy server and minimizes load on master server. Client even doesn't know which is master server and from where data is coming.

pd.conf