Centralizing UNIX Authentication and User Provisioning With Oracle Internet Directory

Overview

Burlington Coat Factory (BCF) is a major garment retailer, based in the Northeast. BCF uses Linux workstations for conducting their core business with employees and customers. They use Star Office for their word processing needs and Oracle ERP and other applications also run on Linux and some Unix variants. There is a limited number of Windows PCs for conversion/integration purposes. As part of this standardization, their Unix/networking Administration group was also experimenting with ways to manage and maintain Linux workstations, especially user identities. The experiment gave rise to using LDAP v3 directory services, as implemented by Oracle Internet directory (OID). This paper describes the steps that were taken to realize this objective.