Red Hat Opens Netscape Directory 229
suezz writes " Eweek is running a story that Redhat is releasing Netscape Directory (LDAP) under the GPL - this is huge at least from my point of view. I know of at least two huge companies that have standardized on Netscape Directory for their web applications."
Re:From a user perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, you can actually do that and more with any LDAP server.
Re:This was an expensive ordeal... (Score:4, Insightful)
Plus, after years of hotair, RedHat just became credible Windows alternative for internal applications. cheep.
Re:This was an expensive ordeal... (Score:5, Insightful)
I know that a few of the Fedora devs commented on how they also got a whole bunch of additional code that they hadn't even asked for but came along with Netscape Directory that they are still trying to figure out what to do with. In a worst case scenario, they'll just open source it and let the community find uses for it (Red Hat open sources everything they do, they even allow any open source projects free use of any patents they may hold, patents btw are only held as legal defense). This a great advancement for the community and should allow many more businesses to start migrating to linux. Back to my original point though... this will allow many more companies to switch to linux, whether it be Red Hat or some other distro it doesn't matter. Overall it will increase linux's marketshare and as a result make linux more popular leading more businesses to look at it as an alternative. A good percentage of those businesses will probably become Red Hat customers so everyone wins.
Regards,
Steve
Enterprise Solutions (Score:4, Insightful)
Now if they would only open source Netscape calendaring...
Re:This was an expensive ordeal... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Now if only it had Hula's calendaring and email (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:This has huge 'killer' potential (Score:1, Insightful)
The big downside to the product is that you had to use Netscape 4 client, and the calendaring was kinda clunky. That killed when my company did a comparison with Exchange.
Re:This was an expensive ordeal... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
My whole point is that you don't get anything even remotely like Group Policy under any *nix LDAP authentication scheme I'm aware of unless you do a lot of custom hacking.
AD is pretty awesome, and I'd really LIKE most of the power it offers on other platforms. As far as I'm concerned that's the biggest thing the Windows platform has going for it. That, and it's documented
As for AD problems
I would ask you to, next time, take the time to ACTUALLY READ MY MESSAGE before flaming me out too much, OK? You've been just as bad as the people you're complaining about.
Re:Comparison (Score:4, Insightful)
In many ways eDirectory is far more sophisticated. It is more close to a true X500 directory and it has some very sophisticated tools for data replication and management. The admin console is streets ahead of the old Netscape Java Console for starters and the APIs are very well developed. It is very easy do do operations such as prune and graft on the Novell Directory than on the typical standalone LDAP directories (Open LDAP, SUN ONE) where you have to essentially delete and recreate the entry rather than just modify the base DN.
One key differentiator is replication strategy. eDirectory and Microsoft AD are genuine multi-master directories, you can configure them to accept updates anywhere and the data then replicates among the cloud of replicated servers. Open LDAP and Netscape's LDAP are have pyramid structure replication, you update a master, it updates slaves and these can update further consumer servers. This approach can have some advantages if you want to secure updates and be able to take a consistent snapshot of your data at a particular point in time.
Speed is also an issue. I feel that SUN ONE is currently the leader in raw search speed, Netscape produced a very fast server on the same database backend and a suspect Novell is a little slower as it is more feature rich. You will probably only notice this if you are making in excess of 20 searches per second to your box.
So I would advise people to check out eDirectory. Novell have a great history of making some superb product which they then do their upmost to keep secret from paying consumers. If it is free it could well meet most of your needs, especially as the console makes it very easy to set up and populate with sample entries.
Re:This was an expensive ordeal... (Score:2, Insightful)
The above post is a stream of empty claims and not even a hint of factual support. How can you rate someone saying "I haven't looked at the code yet
Nobody here knows what kind of server the Netscape guys were talking about, what those 200,000 clients were doing, or what the directory data looked like. We have No Insight into what that claim means.
But you can look here http://www.symas.com/benchmark.shtml [symas.com] and see charts derived from documented benchmark procedures that You Yourself can repeat and verify, showing that Netscape's performance drops off FASTER than OpenLDAP's as the number of clients increases. You want INSIGHT - doing systematic tests and publishing the tests so that others can verify the results is how you get it. Not by factless gushing from a fanboy who has never seen the code in question.
Re:Now if only it had Hula's calendaring and email (Score:3, Insightful)
And Linux is replacing Apple somewhere else. So what's your point? OS X replaced Linux in some university? Run for the hills! The world is coming to an end!
Re:BFD...the IBM LDAP Server has *always* been fre (Score:5, Insightful)