title: Apache Directory Studio, Part 2 link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/apache-directory-studio-part-2/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 331 created: 2009/04/27 19:21:07 created_gmt: 2009/04/27 19:21:07 comment_status: open post_name: apache-directory-studio-part-2 status: publish post_type: post

Apache Directory Studio, Part 2

After putting it aside for awhile, I decided to take a more serious look at Apache Directory Studio (ADS).

My main motivation was the disappearance of all free links to Jarek Gawor’s LDAP Browser/Editor tool, and my resulting inability to recommend it to others. A secondary, but still important, motivation was to find something a bit more functional. In particular the inability to page search results in LBE has presented a challenge when trying to use it to browse and Active Directory tree. Other than paged results, my criteria for an LBE replacement were simple: (1) be completely free (as in beer); (2) be able to run on both Linux and Windows; and (3) not be a major CPU or memory (RAM or filesystem) hog.

Initial results with the ADS LDAP browser indicate it meets all 3 criteria. While the UI took a little getting used to for me, anyone who is familiar with the standard developer workbench paradigm in Eclipse should find it easy to navigate (ADS is an Eclipse application).

Installation was easy. Just download the latest binary package from here. Binaries are available for Linux, Windows and MacOS. All of these depend on Java 1.5 or above being properly installed and configured on the client machine. My own systems are running Sun Java 1.6 at present, which worked flawlessly.

After downloading, unzip and move it to your chosen folder. On Linux, this was /opt/ApacheDirectoryStudio for me. To get a Gnome desktop shortcut on Linux you’ll also have to make an ApacheDesktopStudio.desktop file in /usr/share/applications, and be sure to map the ApacheDirectoryStudio and ApacheDirectoryStudio.xpm executable and icon.

If you’re already running Eclipse, you can download the latest plugins from here, rather than installing the standalone application.

The LDAP Browser User Guide is pretty well laid out, and should answer most questions about putting it through its paces. It was particularly gratifying to see that all the screenshots were taken from a machine running Ubuntu’s Human Theme.

Some of the options available for each connection are shown in this screenshot of the Connection tab for a connection object.

Many of the same parameters can be reconfigured in each individual search object:

About the only thing I don’t like about ADS is it’s default behavior of forcing you to create a timestamped object for each new search. After doing this a couple of times I realized I could just create my own default object (dubbed “unnamed”) and just change the properties for subsequent searches. Of course there are a lot of people for whom the default behavior will be a helpful mechanism to record common queries for later reuse (this is how I set up a standard schema query).

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