Directory services facilitate access to information
organized under a variety of frameworks and applications. The
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol is a promising technology
that provides access to directory information using a data
structure similar to that of the X.500 protocol. IBM Tivoli,
Novell, Sun, Oracle, Microsoft, and many other vendor features
LDAP-based implementations. The technology’s increasing
popularity is due both to its flexibility and its compatibility with
existing applications. A directory service is a searchable
database repository that lets authorized users and services find
information related to people, computers, network devices, and
applications. Given the increasing need for information —
particularly over the Internet — directory popularity has grown
over the last decade and is now a common choice for distributed
applications. Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)
accommodates the need of high level of security, single sign-on,
and centralized user management. This protocol offers security
services and integrated directory with capability of storage
management user information in a directory. Therefore at the
same time the user can determine application, service, server to
be accessed, and user privileges. It is necessary to realize files
sharing between different operating systems in local area
network. Samba software package, as the bridge across Windows
and Linux, can help us resolve the problem. In this paper, we try
to explore previous literature on this topic and also consider
current authors work then come out with our views on the
subject matter of discussion based on our understanding