In most organizations, there is some form of a central server for handling authentication. An Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) server is a fairly common choice. While it is assumed that your organization has already dealt with this core issue one way or the other and is already running an LDAP server of some sort, it is comparatively easy to set up an LDAP server for testing purposes.
One possibility is using 389 Server, named after the port commonly used for the LDAP server, together with the phpLDAPadmin web application for administration of the LDAP server.
Having this test LDAP server setup is useful for the purposes of this book, since we can then use the same LDAP server for all the different servers we are going to investigate.
