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Red Hat Acquires Netscape Server Products
KrisWithAK writes "According to a press release, Red Hat is acquiring parts of the Netscape Enterprise Suite including the directory server and certificate management system. I am definitely looking forward to more open source competition with OpenLDAP!"
I've used it to replace some Netscape stuff - it was part of a big Weblogic->Oracle->Solaris EJB app.
OpenLDAP seemed to work fine, although maybe it was because we weren't really loading it up too much...
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Developers from Netscape started LDAP. From the looks of the Directory Server it does.
Here's the feature guide for Directory Server 6.21.
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1. Netscape DS compares very favorably. It has multi-master replication, and its performance is far above that of openLDAP. OpenLDAP is opensource, though, and very flexible. Netscape has to be paid for, and it's (if I recall) per-seat licensing. Sun's DS is per-entry licensing. Sun's DS and Netscape's DS are very similar, being forks of iPlanet's DS.
2. Yes, sort of. Some forms of replication can work, and both are standard ldap servers. As far as I know (I haven't used openldap for a bit) openldap cannot understand Netscape/iPlanet/Sun Directory server's new replication.
ACL's in iPlanet/Netscape/Sun's DS are wonderful. ACL's can be held in any entry, and take effect immediately. All you have to do is request the aci attribute (assuming you have priveledges) to see the rules. Acl's go so far as to be dynamic, too, taking into account the binding user's DN, being able to create masks, etc.. There are some wonderful features that I hope make it into openLDAP, or heck, if they just open the source of Netscape DS, that'd be incredible.
Then this is definitly for you. Red Hat, as with all things, will open source this. A lot of people say bad things about Red Hat, but they do alot for the community, they just don't try to take the spotlight. I mean how cool is their patent policy? Any patent they get ( which is always for defensive purposes) can be used by any free software project without worries.
Regards,
Steve
I can respond to that with an enthusiastic YES, it does work.
We use it to authenticate our email and calendar users (from two different servers). I'm migrating us off our OLD Netware servers (damn lean budget years!) to Samba and am setting Samba to authenticate against it as well, finally giving our users a single userid and password for all our services.
OpenLDAP is lightweight (size and CPU-wise), robust, and reliable. It's also really easy to set up if you use the version included with your distribution. You can also replicate the server to give yourself good fault-tolerance on another piece of hardware.
RedHat has good online documentation on their website in the RHEL Reference Guide that should help explain things to you a bit.
Life is short: void the warranty.
You said that wrong. Let me help:
I, for one, welcome our new LDAP overlords!
With that said, let me also say that I've been working with Sun's iPlanet Directory server since they acquired it from Netscape. It's used for our iPlanet mail suite. In a word, it sucks ass. The intial migration from Netscape Directory server 3.x to iPlanet's directory server was a nightmare. The documentation on the schema layout for mail was non-existent. (Still is as far as I know) There were no migration tools. I just had to dump the Netscape Directory server data to a huge text file. iPlanet support then told me to go through this file by hand and edit or remove any of the lines that didn't apply or had the wrong format. !!!! WTF!? I spent months of late nights pushing the file back and forth between OpenVMS and Solaris just so my boss could use DCL and EDT to make most of the changes needed. The migration actually took me about a year and a half and there is still detritus floating around the LDAP directory. I now have a better understanding of the user account portion of iPlanet's schema, but no thanks to Sun. iPlanet sucks. I can only hope that Redhat will do a better job with what they've acquired.
One last bit to my rant:
Sun STILL has portions of the old Netscape administration tools in the iPlanet suite. This wouldn't be a problem except for the fact that they still kind of work. Enough to damage LDAP data. According to their support they told me to NOT use those tools. THEN WHY THE HELL ARE THEY STILL INCLUDED!!!!??? Crap. Pure crap.
Un-news
Yes a Directory Server is a database. However, whereas a SQL server is a general purpose database engine, an LDAP Directory Server is typically optimized for read speed at the expense of write speed. Other highlights include a hiarchical tree structure to store entries and extensive standard schema for many object types.
Essentially, LDAP directories fill niche roles, one of which is as an address book server, another is authentication services. In their niche, DS deployments are unequalled (and no, slapping an LDAP protocol interface on a SQL engine doesn't cut it.) One guiding principal is if you have 70/80% reads to 30/20% writes - a directory server may be a better option for your application. There are other considerations, but that is beyond the scope of this blah blah blah...