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!"

Comments

AOL already uses it.....

[ARRRLovin]

....it must be good!

I hope they can advance enough to make some real competition for Microsoft Active Directory. I know a huge reason Windows shops never consider an alternative is because the AD GPO allows for some very granular management of AD resources.

Does OpenLDAP even work?

[Offwhite98]

I have tried ever few months to set up OpenLDAP using newer releases with instructions on their website and it never would work. I always had some issue with the DBM libraries or the commands in the tutorial were inaccurate and not current with the updated command-line options. It goes to show that no matter if the software actually works, if the documenation is not at least half decent the software is still incomplete.

I have maintained Netscape/iPlanet LDAP servers before and they may not be perfect, but they worked. Perhaps a good open source LDAP server will help LDAP become a viable alternative to Windows Directory or other authentication systems.

I thought I read about a Java LDAP server once, but never looked into it much.

Re:Does OpenLDAP even work?

[tylernt]

I feel your pain. OpenLDAP and the other products may compare at the user-level, but for administration, OpenLDAP just sucks. I have yet to find a good administration tool for it. Maybe one is hiding out there or is being developed as I speak.

Novell sucks because there are some things you can do only in NWAdmin, others you can do only in ConsoleOne. Dumb. That's from Netware 5.1 and 6.0 though, maybe their newer stuff has improved.

Lotus Domino's admin software sucks because everything is buried under 17 layers and if you click the wrong 'X' in the interface, you lose all 17 layers and have to start over. I hate Domino.

iPlanet/SunOne's GUI interface isn't too bad but seems to be really slow, even on a 2GHz server with very few users(?). For advanced config options, you sometimes have to resort to editing a text file (albeit still within the admin GUI), which is one weak point.

AD seems to have got it right with the ADUC and other MMC snap-ins, although if you get in and start messing around with permissions and GPOs you'd better know exactly what the heck you are doing because it's real easy to change things in ways you never expected (or in other words, break AD). The only drawback is, you don't have much low-level control over LDAP attributes and things -- you're just kind of stuck with 'the Microsoft Way' of doing things.

In short, there is no perfect solution. I favor OpenLDAP just because it's OSS but the installation (from source) and the learning curve are both unpleasant. If you're a clueless MCSE-type and just want a quick LDAP directory, I'm afraid AD is the least painful route... if you don't mind clicking a soul-sucking EULA and bleeding ridiculous licensing fees to the Evil Empire.

Please tell me about Netscape LDAP server ACL

[Etyenne]

In the past, RedHat have been open-sourcing pretty much every applications they acquired AFAIK (see Sistina GFS, for example). Thus, I am pretty confident we will soon have a second Open-Source LDAP server from this deal. There is no garatee, but I am looking forward to it.

For those who are familiar with Netscape LDAP server, could you teach me a bit about its ACL management capability ? OpenLDAP, in this regard, is pathetic. The ACL have to be written in some kind of filter language *inside* the config file, which need a restart/reload to take effect. It is very error-prone and basically the part of OpenLDAP that give me the most troubles. How is Netscape in this regard ? Can you define by-object ACL ? How are they stored ? How do you manage them ?

Thanks for you insights !

Re:That's still around?

[Penis_Envy]

For me, the Directory Server product is very very interesting. If they could offer up some of the multi-master replication to openLDAP, or the Active Directory integration, big headway could be made in enterprise environments in the Directory Server space.

That's the only thing of interest to me, personally. I think apache's web server eclipsed them a while ago.

Netscape Directory Server...

[MadMorf]

I was responsible for a pair of Netscape Directory Servers, version 6.1 IIRC, at a former employer.

They were relatively trouble free, much more so than some of the other "Netscape" products (Calendar Server)...

Once in awhile they would hang, without any sort of error indication, no log entries or the like, which made troubleshooting them very problematic.

The management interface was a Java app, which seemed fairly primitive,compared to NDS/eDirectory which I have used for about 9 years and AD which I have used since late 2000.

Overall, I'd say my experience with Netscape Directory Server was positive, but it really could use some updating, if it hasn't been already...

Re:are they gonna open source it?

[LnxAddct]

Everything Red Hat has, does, or buys becomes open source. This is equally true for their patents (which are aquired for defensive reasons). Here is their patent policy. In short, it states that any patents they hold may be used by any free software project without fear of any infringement.
Regards,
Steve

The significance of this...

[Pivot]

is that now the best LDAP server in the marketplace in terms of functionality (4 way clustering, complete in-tree ACL support, enterprise level scalability) now becomes available as open source. The iplanet offering comes with a per entry licensing fee of about $1 (less if you need more than one million entries). Our company actually went out and bought Sun servers to avoid this, since Solaris includes a decent number of entry licenses per server. Now we can deploy on linux servers instead without the licensing hassle. Another nail in the Sun coffin...

Re:That's still around?

[LnxAddct]

If you've ever had to use openLDAP then you will never be happier once RH releases this. The features are limitless, but two things off the top of my head are that it has a significant improvement as far as speed and system resources go, and also it has good, advanced replication. It's easy to use and just an all around good architecture. Try it out when its released, it will speak for itself. Personally, I'm more interested in the Certificate Server.
Regards,
Steve

A smart move

[IGnatius T Foobar]

This is a smart move on Red Hat's part. It's clear to them that in order to remain competitive in the enterprise space, they have to have a "middleware stack" (as the industry has been calling it). Sun has SunOne/N1, Microsoft has ADS, and of course Novell has NDS/eDirectory which is soon to be a major Linux product. It would have quickly become a big gap in Red Hat's offering.

By acquiring this software, Red Hat immediately improves the value proposition of their platform. By open sourcing it, the software can quickly gain mindshare and installed base. Imagine what would have happened if Novell had done this in, say, 1999. There'd be NDS everywhere, and Active Directory wouldn't have nearly the penetration it does today.

Finally linux for CertServer and Calendar Server?

[Forget4it]

Netscape and then Sun stopped just when they were getting the plot. The Calendar Server has a backend that does the conflict resolution inc case of double-booking. It is time to integrate that with Mozilla Calender client. The Certificate Management system played nice with LDAP and but had a top-heavy administration server. It was a nice web-based GUI that an CertAuthority might be delegated to use. It will be a big win for OSS if these servers can now supported in linux - Sun were never going to do that properly. my 2 cents