Red Hat to Open-Source Netscape Directory | May 26th, 2005
Red Hat to Open-Source Netscape Directory
What can I say? I’m excited. I played with Open LDAP - it was painful. I worked with eDirectory - it was awesome - but way outside my budget for use anywhere outside a corporate deployment. I’m hoping this helps push the directory service stuff into more applications.
I actually think done right Directory services can be incredible cool as a tool for gluing applications together. The only problem is that although LDAP is a “standard” my limited experience makes it seem like it has even more warts than dealing with “standard” SQL.
If this is easy to setup and administrate - it may end up in my permanent tool kit.
May 26th, 2005 at 2:36 pm
From an application’s standpoint, there isn’t much of a “standard” for LDAP to follow… other than syntax for your query. The problem is going to be how the directory on the server is organized, and given the fact that LDAP makes it easy to set things up however you want them, it’s going to be impossible for a developer to determine a one-size-fits-all LDAP query to run.
That means that sysadmins who deploy the app will need to learn how to put together an LDAP search filter to take advantage of it…. but I think when they realize what centralized authentication and authorization info will save them they’ll be willing to spend 5 minutes to read up on it. :)
June 14th, 2005 at 5:19 pm
I looked at the Red Hat Directory Server and it’s not been repackaged enough to make it “easy” or “simple.” It’s got a lot of crufty bits left over from when it was a Sun application.
So it’s definitely got a distinctly Sun-ish flavor to it, which is pretty disconcerting to most Linux people. But, I figure that’ll change over time.
My verdict for the moment is that it’s not done enough yet. Better put it back in the oven for a while.
June 15th, 2005 at 9:44 am
Not really suprising since it’s actually “enterprise” software - which in my limited experience means - intentionally painful to install and maintain so as to justify IT staff to deal with it.
I figure I’ll wait to see if anyone picks it up and builds and app with it.