Just doing some playing around. I want to use one of my PCs on my home LAN as a fileserveer. Mainly, the idea is to share the directory of family photos locally. I know all I really need here is samba. But I thought I mught as well use PAM to do authentication. Which led me to consider using LDAP and SASL. Why? I don't know. He's on third.

Anyway after having installed Samba, and relevant PAM modules and SASL and LDAP and setting up an LDAP server, I'm left wondering what LDAP is really useful for? I've read the FAQ, quickstart guide, several HOWTOs and the Administrator's manual. I have a working LDAP daemon running, but am left wondering what to do with it.

Does anyone use LDAP? How? Why?

Now at some point I might like allowing some of my remote family members to access this content from outside. Which was one reason I thought I'd play around with some of these tools. So that I could add users without creating local accounts, and also to maintain a single password database for managing passwords.

Thanks.

Brian JD