16 Tales from integrating OpenLDAP with the modern world | Florian Best (Univention) | LDAPCon 2026

OpenLDAP has been at the core of Univention Corporate Server (UCS) and Univention Nubus for 25 years. During that time, it has proven to be a reliable foundation for directory services, while the requirements around it have changed significantly. A central goal of Univention has always been to make LDAP-based identity management easier to use while integrating technologies such as Samba/Active Directory, Kerberos, and Keycloak into a common directory-based platform. Univention Directory Manager provides a management layer on top of LDAP to achieve that goal. This talk shares a selection of challenges and lessons learned from building and operating UCS and Nubus on top of OpenLDAP. Rather than presenting LDAP in theory, the focus is on practical problems that appeared in real deployments and the solutions we developed along the way.