LDAP, ActiveDirectory and the death of Linux at corporate

[Paul Tansom]

** Brian Fahrlander <brian at fahrlander.net> [2007-08-14 21:35]:
>      I just 'enjoyed' telling my contractor-boss that "If you're not 
> going to rely on the Linux server for email (using Exchange instead for 
> the reminders,etc) and you're not using it to serve files (cause they 
> don't need it) and the on-site tech is windows-based, why is that 
> machine there?".
> 
>      Microsoft came in through the front door, but it squeezes out 
> competition by the darkened side-streets, and climbing in metaphorical 
> windows. (Pardon the pun)
> 
>      The contractor has been telling me he wants to support Linux, but 
> in this little low-tech town, while the Windows business keeps climbing, 
> we've added only three other Linux clients.  His first offering, though 
> he refuses to admit it) is always a Windows jail.
> 
>      If we can't get up some kind of people-organizer, more of these 
> sites will fall to Exchange.  If we can't get our collective asses 
> organized, ActiveDirectory will eat our LDAP ambitions.
> 
>      I've tried getting in touch with the two main LDAP-centric 
> community pages; there must be some mechanism to find them than I've 
> tried. The LDAP sub-community is bottle-necked, adhering to one vendor's 
> layout or another....when all we need to begin is our _own_ layout that 
> will authenticate for us.
> 
>      Why is nothing happening on this part?  Can anyone clue me? I know 
> LDAP seems "hard"...but it's not that bad.  Deciding how to layout the 
> data (with all it's flexibility) is the hard part.  We can fix this; we 
> don't have to stand-down and let Microsoft roll right over us...
> 
>      If you're interested in LDAP in any way, please contact me.
** end quote [Brian Fahrlander]

Personally I'd love to know whether when Red Hat took on the old
Netscape LDAP server and made it into the Fedora LDAP project they also
took on any other bits of the related Netscape work. I know they
wouldn't have taken on the other server sections, but back in the mid to
late 90s I used to administer a Netscape based setup that had the LDAP
server using a schema that supported calendaring, proxy, email and web
authentication and could also synchronise with Windows servers (NT 4 at
the time). No doubt he critical bits are tied up at various points down
the route between the original Netscape through Sun, etc. and on to Red
Hat, but that setup, should it be accessible, would provide a ready made
starting point from which to work - and it worked quite nicely at the
time. I suspect Sun has the Netscape Messaging server, along with the
web server and proxy server technologies, and iirc these dissapeared
into the Sun server suite which already competed with them. The
calendaring server was third party, so sadly no access there (although
again Sun should have access to a ready made solution that was the Star
Office caledaring server, although iirc this vanished post version 5.2
shortly before sun took over Star Office). It is a great shame that
these alternatives have been lost along the way.

As an aside, are there any good comparisons between OpenLDAP and the
Fedora Diredctory Server? I'm a bit torn having worked with the Netscape
product when it was still Netscape, but at the same time OpenLDAP is
historically the one used on Linux.

-- 
Paul Tansom | Aptanet Ltd. | http://www.aptanet.com/ | 023 9238 0001
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