1233236 - I'd like my LDAP phonebook back

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Infrastructure & Operations :: Infrastructure: LDAP, task)

Description

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

Apparently, we have lost the ability to use the LDAP as a phonebook for Thunderbird and other e-mail apps. This is a shame, as it was quite useful. How could we get back this ability?

Comment 1

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to David Rajchenbach-Teller [:Yoric] (use "needinfo") from comment #0)
> Apparently, we have lost the ability to use the LDAP as a phonebook for
> Thunderbird and other e-mail apps. This is a shame, as it was quite useful.
> How could we get back this ability?

https://mana.mozilla.org/wiki/display/SD/Syncing+your+Contacts+to+Thunderbird

Ludo

Comment 2

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

Tried that already. It syncs only my contacts (i.e. pretty much nobody, since I don't add people to contacts), not the rest of the phonebook.

Comment 3

[Justin Dow [:jabba]]

We decomissioned this service (addressbook.mozilla.com) for a variety of reasons:

1) The infrastructure on which it resided was being retired
2) There were only around 20 people using it
3) It implemented "LDAP over SSL on port 636" which is deprecated
4) Implementing "LDAP over STARTTLS on port 389" was not feasible without re-architecting the infrasctructure (and many of our user's clients no longer supported the deprecated version)
5) All the clients in our user base, except Thunderbird, had implemented working google directory access - including Global Address List search, which is a direct replacement for what we had.
6) Once we switched to Gmail, Google's Directory superseded our LDAP directory for mail client usage
7) It was difficult to configure for most users

In the end, everything moved on to Google and Thunderbird was the one major client that didn't have some sort of google directory integration, and a lot of our thunderbird users moved to using Google's webmail interface. So in the end, the already small number of users of that service was rapidly declining and the cost to keep the service was rapidly rising and we decided to discontinue it.

It's been over a year since we turned it off, I think (or close to a year), and this is the first time I've heard anyone ask about it... that said, I think there might be a workaround if you are really interested in getting it working again.

addressbook.mozilla.com was just an LDAP server, which had some restrictive ACLs and was listening on the public internet. While we've turned that off, we still have LDAP servers in our datacenters with the same data. So if you were inclined to get this functionality back, you could use our VPN service to connect to our datacenter and then using the same settings as before, except replace the hostname "addressbook.mozilla.com" with "ldap.db.scl3.mozilla.com", you might end up with a working setup again; the caveat being that we don't really support this usage of the datacenter LDAP servers (if it works, you are welcome to use it. If it doesn't work, we probably aren't going to change anything server side to make it work), and that you'll have to be connected to the VPN in order for it to work.

I also personally believe that it must be possible to get a working Google Directory addon for thunderbird, if someone is ambitious enough, but I have no experience in that area - just assuming since other clients exist.