LDAP, ActiveDirectory and the death of Linux at corporate

[Brian Fahrlander]

Paul Tansom wrote:

> 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.

     Yeah, see? One vendor sets something up, the other vendors turn up 
their nose and propose another option; that's why Linux doesn't have 
easily-usable LDAP.

     In fact, LDAP is the reason I left Redhat, after being with them 
from 4.0 to FC4; they felt nothing wrong with putting a flawed version 
of LDAP, and an old one at that, into the repos, because they were 
coming with something they bought from Netscape.

     But there IS a Posix definition...as Ubuntu, we could take that and 
build on it; an industry-standard start.  All the tools that deal with 
authentication know to look for PosixAccount.  Now, adding addressbooks 
and things like that are going to require fiddling, but as it is, we're 
going nowhere.

     Are you in a place to setup and test an LDAP server, should I get 
something started? (To proofread the HOWTO before we mark it "ready"?)

-- 
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  Brian Fahrländer                 Christian, Conservative, and Technomad
  Evansville, IN                              http://Fahrlander.net/brian
  ICQ: 5119262                         AOL/Yahoo/GoogleTalk: WheelDweller
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