Search LDAP on Ubuntu

06 Jun 2018

This is a quick one to show how to search a LDAP server for a specific user.

Today I needed to gather some e-mails from my coworkers to configure an internal tool. My memory fails me with this kind of stuff and I needed a way to quickly find their e-mails (which are based on their uid on th LDAP server).

Linux has a package named ldap-utils in which it has some useful tools to work with LDAP. The one I was interested was ldapsearch.

One quick look into its linux man page and I got this info from it (I removed the parts that are not interesting for this post):

ldapsearch [-h ldaphost] [-x] filter [attrs...]

ldapsearch -h server -x fullname="Fernando*Crespo" uid

The output of that command is very straight forward.

# extended LDIF
#
# LDAPv3
# base <> (default) with scope subtree
# filter: fullname=Fernando*Crespo
# requesting: uid 
#

# fernando, AREA, ORGANIZATION
dn: cn=fernando,ou=AREA,o=ORGANIZATION
uid: fernando

# search result
search: 2
result: 0 Success

# numResponses: 2
# numEntries: 1

As I said in my last post, this blog will serve as my personal wiki for me to remember things as my memory is not that good. Hope I can bring some of my daily knowledge to some of you.


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