[Asterisk-Dev] Re: [Announce] Asterisk::LDAP initial release

[Peter Nixon]

On Monday 06 June 2005 04:18, Ben Klang wrote:
> Fellow developers,
>
> My organization uses LDAP extensively to manage our customer information
> and we were looking for a way to store phone system information with the
> rest of our data.  Unfortunately the solutions we found were not
> adequate for our needs.  To fill that void, I humbly submit
> Asterisk::LDAP.
>
> Asterisk::LDAP is a Perl module I have written and released under the
> terms of the GPL which is capable of generating Asterisk version 1.0
> compatible configuration files from an LDAP data source.  Currently it
> supports generation of extensions.conf, voicemail.conf and
> musiconhold.conf.  Future plans include sip.conf, iax.conf and
> meetme.conf.  As this is the first release it is sure to include lots
> bugs so I disclaim any kind of responsiblity for anything including
> remembering why I wrote any particular piece of code any particular way.
> That being said it has been tested in my environment and I think it
> works well.  Example scripts are in the tarball, including one which can
> be dropped in voicemail.conf's 'externpass' argument to update a user's
> voice mailbox PIN when changed via the telephone interface.
>
> There is much work left to do, not the least of which is documentation.
> I have made an attempt to document the methods via perldoc ('perldoc
> Asterisk::LDAP' after installation) and through the example code.  I
> welcome any suggestions or contributions.
>
> I also want to say that I KNOW this is a big ugly hack.  The Right Way
> to do it will be Real Time Asterisk.  Unfortunately I needed a solution
> yesterday and this fit the bill.
>
> If you think you'd like to take a look for yourself, hop on over to
> http://projects.alkaloid.net.
>
> Enjoy!  Comments and criticisms to ben at alkaloid.net.  Complaints
> to /dev/null.

Thanks for this. It looks like it will be usefull for us. We currently have 
been achieving a similar goal with a similar perl script writing out from a 
SQL server but have been looking at using eDirectory and/or OpenLDAP as a 
replicated backend for quite some time now. You are correct that for big 
installations this needs to be done in realtime but this will be sufficient 
for alot of people who don't have such large deployments. Thanks for you 
efforts Ben.

"Big Ugly Hacks" are good because they generally goad others on to implement 
it "the right way" and everyone wins in the long run ;-)

Regards

-- 

Peter Nixon
http://www.peternixon.net/
PGP Key: http://www.peternixon.net/public.asc