For those who like to try an LDAP instance without actually going through the hassle of installing the server, there are a few open and public LDAP servers available online. Some of them offer write access, for example, FreeIPA (https://www.freeipa.org/page/Main_Page). FreeIPA is an integrated security information management solution that offers an online demo installation for testing purposes at https://ipa.demo1.freeipa.org/ipa/ui/. We will use it for our recipes. As with any public server with write access, FreeIPA server needs to be cleaned up daily. During these hours, it goes offline. The FreeIPA web interface is shown as follows:

You may also use ldap.forumsys.com, another public LDAP server with read-only access to test our recipes. You may find more LDAP servers accessible online with read-only and write accesses, or you may even configure your own LDAP server to have full control. In this recipe, we will connect to the LDAP server and receive information from it through our Python program.

First, install the python-ldap3 (http://ldap3.readthedocs.io/tutorial_intro.html) package as a prerequisite for this recipe using the following command:

$ sudo pip install ldap3