LDAP

From Peyton Hall Documentation

LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. We use it in Peyton Hall to replace NIS (Network Information Service), which holds all the user names and encrypted passwords for logging in. It also can store a lot more, including information on the hardware in the building, and more information on each account and group. It is more secure than NIS, since you have to have the right credentials to be able to read the encrypted passwords from the directory, however anyone can try to "bind" to the directory as a user, to test if the given password is correct for a specified user. Also because it is widely supported for authentication, we can use it for other applications than just logging in; these pages are an example, where the web server uses your normal user name and password to authenticate to LDAP and verify your identity.