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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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I didn't even realize there still was a standalone Netscape offerring. We migrated from Netscape to iPlanet to Sun Web to Sun Java One (or something like that). Anybody out there stick with the Netscape product?
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
"I am definitely looking forward to more open source competition with OpenLDAP!"
I'm looking more for an LDAP that's easy to setup and run.
However a couple of questions.
1. How does the Netscape Directory Server compare to OpenLDAP?
2. Are the two interoperable?
....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.
-Randy
Seriously? I thought the Netscape Enterprise product line fizzled out back when people thought selling pet food on the internet was a good idea.
Do you mind if I ask, how worthwhile are these products to Redhat? What kind of state are they in? How recently have they been updated, are they still in active development or just maitenence mode? Does anyone still use them? And do they offer any worthwhile features or functionality not already available in free products?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
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.
Brennan Stehling - http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/
I read the press release, and they made reference to integrating the products into the Open Source Architecture, but they don't actually come out and say, "we're gonna make it [insert favorite license here]."
Also, is there any reference documentation for the Open Source Architecture? I'd love it, cause as it stands, sometimes open sources like a disorganized mess.
Just two years ago AOL was looking to aquire Red Hat. http://slashdot.org/articles/02/01/19/041215.shtml It's amazing how things have changed. Where AOL once wanted Red Hat to be another Netscape for them, Red Hat is now purchasing parts of Netscape from AOL. Personally, I think its great.
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 !
:wq
I don't understand what Red Hat is trying to do. It's ancient software. The brand "Netscape" is now. They already sell a competing product.
The schizophrenia that Red Hat is displaying makes Sun & Oracle look sane by comparison.
I don't respond to AC's.
This is, IMHO, a good thing. I tried to get a couple of Netscape Servers up and running last year. The Directory Server was a snap, but the Messaging Server had problems. Since it hasn't been update since Sun abandoned the IPlanet joint venture, we tried to use various plugins and hacks to keep it from being used as an open relay, or getting spam floods, but no luck. We ended up abandoning the project, but we may be re-doing it in Open Exchange.
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
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...
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
iPlanet was a join Sun/Netscape venture. AOL bought Netscape, thus Netscape's Directory server. When the iPlanet venture was dissolved, AOL had the directory server, which was one of the things Netscape brought to the iPlanet experiment. I don't recall the details, but I think they forked the code when iPlanet was absorbed into Sun.
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...
So whatever happened to Netscape's calendar server?
Way back, I installed it at an R&D facility; the client worked across platforms (solaris and windows) and provided an alternative to the nasty exchange lock-in.
Is there *any* alternative to Exchange now?
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
...All of which means that Red Hat did NOT just buy all of the fun and interesting products that iPlanet produced -- Messaging/Calendar/et al are actually useful, mature, stable products -- but instead bought a stable LDAP server whose codebase probably hasn't changed much in several years.
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.
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You may be interested in pGina; it's a nifty, opensource, project that allows you to bypass Microsoft's authentication schemes and replace it with something like LDAP. Works like a charm! We're still working out the kinks of the roaming profiles with the ftp plugin though. Anyone interested in cross-platform authentication should check it out.
harmonious design
There are a lot of patent questions around mono, mostly when you go beyond the core language spec. There are lot of patents around java too but at least IBM owns most of them.
For the moment Red Hat has been extensively involved in things like the GNU java compiler. That has an additional advantage over a virtual machine - it can generate native code so you can program in java and get sane memory consumption and performance, while jits generally only achive one of the two (or neither usually)
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harmonious design
I didn't even realize there still was a standalone Netscape offerring. We migrated from Netscape to iPlanet to Sun Web to Sun Java One (or something like that). Anybody out there stick with the Netscape product?
This is a direct challenge to Novell/SuSE and Novell Directory Services [or eDirectory, or whatever they're calling it this week].
Red Hat must have realized that they needed a directory offering to compete in the enterprise.
That gives us four major directory vendors:
PS: Now that the Netscape browser has devolved into Firefox, and the enterprise stuff has been sold to Red Hat, does Netscape still exist as an independent company [other than some "portal" site on the web]?PPS: And are there any /. CPAs who'd care to calculate AOL's return on investment from the Netscape purchase?
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
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
AOL has 21 days to remove all 3rd party source code from the builds of all of the products Redhat is acquiring. One of the key components of Enterprise Mail server is the Mail Transfer Agent (MTA).
The MTA is written by Innosoft International (www.innosoft.com). So the question is will they be leaving out a vital component of the mail server or will they just have to give away the MTA as well.
This is not my sig
About three years ago (admittedly, my knowledge is pretty old now) I tested and compared the two. The Netscape LDAP server used up a huge chunk of memory, even sitting idle, and could handle only a few authentication's / searches per second on our dual P-III 750 machine with 1 gig ram. The memory usage, if I recall correctly, was about 50 megs per process (not shared mem, individual memory usage by the way) with a default of something like 5 of them running.
OpenLDAP used about 20 megs of memory total, ramping up to 50 to 100 megs under heavy load. It could handle about 30 to 40 auths / searches a second.
Worse for the Netscape server was that it would just plain stop working after an hour or so of heavy load testing.
We went with OpenLDAP, and wrote our own edit screens for it since at the time it came with nothing very useful to a user (only ldapadd, etc... command line stuff).
After about a year of only handling the web server it was on we pointed our Peoplesoft implementation at it, which proceeded to increase our load from one auth every couple of seconds to about 10 auths a second. Other than the slightly larger number of openldap processes running, we never really noticed the load.
Hope that helps anyone looking at the two. I certainly would hope the Netscape server has gotten better, but everything I've read about it since then seems to say it hasn't.
--- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
Will Red Hat dump the Apache webserver over the new noxious licensing?
OpenBSD has done so (by halting with an old release).
AOL buys Netscape for $4.2 billion.
AOL sells Netscape for $30 million.
Hmm.. Carry the 4... the 0's... Yep, that's a crap deal. Congrats to AOL and all parties involved.
And everyone was worried AOL would buy RedHat. Oh the irony!
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
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...
It should be mentioned that most of Netscape's products started out as free software:
1. Netscape Directory Server was derived from the UMich LDAP implementation.
2. Netscape Messaging Server started life as Cyrus and Post.Office hacked together.
3. Netscape Collabra Server was an enhanced INN.
4. etc. and of course, let's not forget NCSA Mosaic...
Yes a Directory Server is a database.
A database that is not even in 1st normal form.
Other highlights include a hiarchical tree structure to store entries and extensive standard schema for many object types.
And primary keys called "dn"s (distinguished names) that reflect the tree structure in a kind of path, so that when you move objects around in the tree, the dn changes. You'll have to change all other attributes that contain this dn as a value in order to keep the tree consistent. There are no mechanisms in LDAP that help you to do this, i.e. there are no constraints.
But that isn't really a problem, because you wouldn't want to use dn valued entries anyway - LDAPs query language has no join operation at all, so in order to resolve a mail alias object containing dn valued entries for the rhs of the mail alias, you'd be forced to program that resolution in a loop by hand on the client side. For each client supporting it.
In order to minimize dn volatility, you end up flattening your tree structure, for example by putting all users into the same level just below "ou=users,dc=example,dc=com". Which has the added benefit of making a lot of queries easier and faster. You know, LDAP has tree structures just like XML does, but the LDAP query language does not have axes the way XPath has. You would not have been able to leverage the tree structure in LDAP queries anyway. There is no way to formulate "find me all machine objects that have person objects at some level above them where the person is at management level" in term of the LDAP query language. It would be trivial in XPath.
And that is just before you start to think about missing bulk replication protocols, language variants of attribute values or the internal structure of Netscape aci attributes.
LDAP is the single worst designed database structure you can come across. It is not "not in normal form", it is the anti-normal, a complete deviation.