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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...
The Army reading list
"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.
....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/
Netscape Directory Server 6 was basically a fork of the iplanet DS 5 product, where Sun carried on the 5.x versioning.
Very very similar products, both good.
Developers from Netscape started LDAP. From the looks of the Directory Server it does.
Here's the feature guide for Directory Server 6.21.
Check out Mon and Mon.cgi
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
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.
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...
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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.
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
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...
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
It became iPlanet CS, which became SunONE CS and is integrated into the Sun JES stack. It now includes an Outlook connector.
http://wwws.sun.com/software/products/calendar_
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
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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.
Sorry, Sun makes a great alternative to exchange. With Sun Messaging Server, and Calendar deployed it works better, and cheaper than exchange. With the outlook connector you can use it with Outlook as well. Sun also offers a unified web client that brings calendar, mail and address book together in one web interface (much better than OWA).
For proof, I did an implementation for over 1 million users of calendar, directory and messaging. Its run on three 6800's (two for messaging, one for calendar, all domained and clustered) and has, yes, this is true, only 2, yes 2 admins.
Try that with exchange!
# nohup
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...