A. Useful Aids

There are a few other programs that might be useful, particularly if you have many users and do not want to configure everything manually.

security/pam_mkhomedir is a PAM module that always succeeds; its purpose is to create home directories for users which do not have them. If you have dozens of client servers and hundreds of users, it is much easier to use this and set up skeleton directories than to prepare every home directory.

sysutils/cpu is a pw(8)-like utility that can be used to manage users in the LDAP directory. You can call it directly, or wrap scripts around it. It can handle both TLS (with the -x flag) and SSL (directly).

sysutils/ldapvi is a great utility for editing LDAP values in an LDIF-like syntax. The directory (or subsection of the directory) is presented in the editor chosen by the EDITOR environment variable. This makes it easy to enable large-scale changes in the directory without having to write a custom tool.

security/openssh-portable has the ability to contact an LDAP server to verify SSH keys. This is extremely nice if you have many servers and do not want to copy your public keys across all of them.