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Red Hat Opens Netscape Directory

Posted by samzenpus on from the it's-good-to-share dept.

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."

8 of 229 comments (clear)

  1. This was an expensive ordeal... by coop0030 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Red hat paid $20.5 million for this LDAP. Will they get that in return? Is it possible with this type of software?

    1. Re:This was an expensive ordeal... by LnxAddct · · Score: 5, Insightful

      In the short term no they wont make this money back right away, but in the long term they'll make it back a thousand fold. Anyone who has ever tried to setup and configure OpenLDAP knows that its not worth it and will send you to a mental hospital fairly quickly. Netscape Directory (or whatever they're calling it now) is not only extremely easy to configure, but it was designed by brilliant engineers. Back a few years ago the engineers were claiming that one typical server running Netscape Directory could handle 200,000 clients. I haven't looked at the code yet, but according to some Red Hat enginneers that I've talked to that have seen it, they confirm that this is probably possible and were generally extrememly impressed with the code quality. Netscape Directory is high quality from its core all the way out to its exterior with easy configuration, how often do you see that in any environment(commercial or open).

      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

    2. Re:This was an expensive ordeal... by NixLuver · · Score: 5, Informative

      Actually, I'm aware of an installation where a single (fairly robust) sun box is running at 200GB db size and 32 million LDAP entries on SunOne (descendant of the Netscape code). It sucks, but it works. Let's be honest - even the NS directory server is a nightmare to set up beyond the most rudimentary schema. Easier than OpenLDAP, true, but *easy*?

      --
      Thinking outside my Head
  2. Re:What's ND have that OpenLDAP doesnt? by bernywork · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From TFA:

    single-authentication, user-identity management and multimaster replication. Also, centralized phone book, employee locator and org-chart tool.

    I would also suggest that the speed complaints that people have with OpenLDAP wouldn't be there.

    --
    Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
  3. Re:What's ND have that OpenLDAP doesnt? by {X-Frog} · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I didn't really use both a lot, but I tried to set up an Open LDAP server with some modification to the default templates, it was a fucking HELL to make it works!

    Netscape Directory is sooooooo but soooo easy to install, manage (with a little gui if you want), replicate. It's really important in a big environment with thousands of users and hundreds of servers that really on ldap servers! I would never do that with OpenLDAP!

  4. Re:What's ND have that OpenLDAP doesnt? by Doktor+Memory · · Score: 5, Interesting

    OpenLDAP is basically an LDAP toolkit. You've got your LDAP server, client libraries, command-line tools... but that's it. What you build with it is up to you, and you're starting from scratch each time pretty much.

    Now, that isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but when you're trying to bootstrap a real, useful corporate directory service from scratch, it's a hell of a learning curve.

    Netscape/SunONE Directory Server was less hacker-friendly, but it would take you from zero to a functioning directory in about 30 minutes, not including hiring a temp to type in all of the corporate info.

    It had its quirks, and I worry about the codebase being a bit... rotted these days. But I'm happy to see it hitting OSS-land. A little competition for OpenLDAP can only improve matters.

    --

    News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.

  5. Now if only it had Hula's calendaring and email by gnatware · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Can RH possibly integrate the http://hula-project.org/ into this roll out? I would really like to have THE non-M$ directory/email/calendaring system running for my school district: single sign-on and email accounts for teachers, staff, students, parents... with Mac OS X Server directory delegation, Kerberos, etc.

    A killer kombination for Open Source.

  6. We used SUN/One for SprintPCS and....... it sucked by dlippolt · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In the development and staging environments it was great. As other posters mentioned you could get from zero to something usable in less than 30 minutes. Everything was as you would expect.

    However... in the -production- environment, with 10's of millions of ldap objects connected to SprintPCS's provisioning systems which were making 1,000+ ldap writes --a minute-- the SunOne system absolutely blew chunks.

    LDAP architects will ask what the hell we were doing with the entire database in one ldap instance rather than partition the dataset, and they'd be right, but we were acting under Sun's direction since at the time we had one of (if not) the largest LDAPs in the world.

    LDAP architects would also wonder why on earth you would ask an ldap server to live under such a write intensive churn, and they'd be right again.

    That being said...

    -- Multimaster replication would never ever work. Most of the time the entire SprintPCS userbase was hanging off one master and less than 4 replication slaves. For several months the entire messaging system was wedged into a single point of failure nightmare. (to be fair, this wasn't all slapd's fault and had 1/2 of the root cause in Sprint Datacenter practices which produced predictable results)

    -- Other posters asked for SunOne Calendar server to be opensourced. My first response is to suggest you have your head examined since that thing would die for absolutely no reason on a regular basis. We actually automated the process of detecting its death and restoring from last night's backup. If you were a SprintPCS customer and your calendar ever seemed screwy now you know why. Of course further reflection suggested opensourcing it is probably the only thing that could help at this point because...

    -- We used to get hotfix builds from Sun which were missing entire sections of the binaries. Whoever was managing the code would forget to use the same compilation flags for hotfixes as original code so we would receive webmail frontend builds which couldn't talk to imap backends, or calendar backends which wouldn't accept connections from calendar front ends.

    -- SOL if you wanted to run more than 4G of memory in slapd.

    Dont consider this post a rant, just let any CIO's/etc. reading this know that this opensource release will probably work great for you if you dont load it heavily (unlike exchange 5x, which would grenade just sitting there)

    On the other hand, if you want to push the performance envelope, pretty much expect it to take alot of time and cause a bunch of headaches -in production-. Get help from people who have pushed the performance of the tools you are considering running.

    Weird mood tonight.