Earlier this week the Infrastructure team rolled out phase one of the planned LDAP services.  

We are using LDAP for authentication of shell accounts.  For now this is the extent of the implementation, however the next phase should follow this quite quickly.

The next phase will involve moving to LDAP to manage access to our subversion repositories. This is a slightly more complicated migration as we currently use an SVNAuthz file, that contains the appropriate groups and their memberships.  We are currently working on a new template system where by changes to LDAP will trigger a build of the SVNAuthz file based on groups in LDAP.  This means we must watch LDAP changes, work on a template system, and if a new version of the template is checked into Subversion we need to trigger a build again.  This is a work in progress at the moment. 

If you find yourself in the position of needing to change your shell account password you can do it by doing this on the command line "ldappasswd -W -S -A -D uid=availid,ou=people,dc=apache,dc=org"  -- Where availid is your ASF username.   For example  "ldappasswd -W -S -A -D uid=pctony,ou=people,dc=apache,dc=org".  This is far from an elegant solution, but for now it works.  You will be required to enter and confirm your current password, and then enter and confirm your new password choice, followed by your LDAP password (this is your old password) .

We are working on a web portal that will allow users to edit attributes, such as forwarding address, password, etc.  This will be made available as soon as it is ready.  If you don't know your current password, then you will need to email  root@ as per usual. 

You can follow the trials and tribulations of the rollout on my personal blog