Planning the LDAP network model refers to determining the physical servers to be deployed for the LDAP naming service. To ensure availability and performance, each subnet of the network must have one LDAP server to service the clients in that subnet. When planning for this model, you should consider the following:
Number of systems to be deployed as LDAP servers
Which servers are designated master servers, and which servers are replicas that serve as backups?
The manner of access to the servers
Should all the LDAP servers have equal priority for access by client requests? Or, will the servers have different priorities and those with higher priorities be accessed first? If access to the servers is not equal, list the order in which these servers are accessed.
The information that you specify is managed by the defaultServerList and preferredServerList attributes.
Timeout factors
Determine the timeout values as follows:
bindTimeLimit attribute determines how long a TCP connect request continues before the request is dropped.
searchTimeLimit attribute determines how long an LDAP search operation continues before the search is cancelled.
profileTTL attribute determines how often a client downloads profiles from the servers.
For example, in a slow network, you might increase the length of time for searching and for allowing TCP connect requests. In a development environment, you might limit the frequency of downloading a profile by a client.