Browsing LDAP contacts in an email client is a missing feature in almost all the mail clients out there, with the exception of the Evolution client.
We came across a Thunderbird extension, "Contacts Sidebar", that gives us just this nice feature! You can browse LDAP server within the main Thunderbird frame.
Hope you like it!
There are a few LDAP search attributes that are not used often, but good to know of. They come in handy when doing scripting too. Here's a quick summray of them. I don't believe this is part of the RFC, but instead it has been adopted by a few different LDAP servers out there, including OpenDS.
This + attribute will result in all operational attributes being returned with the result.
ldapsearch -h hostname -b dc=example,dc=com "(objectclass=*)" "+"
To get a full list of all attributes belonging to an entry, you just need to NOT specify the search attribute. But, if you want all the attributes plus the operational attributes, you can specify (the * attribute tells the server to return all attributes):
ldapsearch -h hostname -b dc=example,dc=com "(objectclass=*)" "*" "+"
This will get all entries, but no attributes are returned. This is like doing a search and telling it to give the "dn" attribute only.
ldapsearch -h hostname -b dc=example,dc=com "(objectclass=*)" "1.1"
Finally, an interesting one, ever wonder to what objectclass an attribute belongs to? There is no way to do that exactly, but something that can help is, using the "@objectclass" search attribute. This can get all attributes that belong to a specified objectclass.
ldapsearch -h hostname -b dc=example,dc=com "(objectclass=*)" "@person"
Like mentioned above, you can also combine these different "virtual" attributes to get a combined result, such as:
ldapsearch -h hostname -b dc=example,dc=com "(objectclass=*)" "+" "*"
Hope this helps someone!